Processing VIMS cubes, An attempt at "true" color Options

[ugordan]

Right, a suggestion I made here in another topic made me wonder why not try that myself. A bunch of data was sitting on the PDS, after all. After a hassle figuring out just how the image cubes are organized and trying to read them, finally I was able to produce some results. This is all very rough work, can be considered first-iteration only and not particularly accurate.
Basically, I used the cubes to extract the visible spectrum in the 380-780 nanometer range which was then input to color matching code I found here by Andrew T. Young.
The code integrates over 40 10-nm steps to produce CIE XYZ color components. I then converted these to RGB values.

I'm aware of at least three inaccuracies in my code as of yet: one is the above sampled code apparently uses Illuminant C as the light source, not true solar spectra so the color turns out bluish (has a temp. of 9300 K instead of 6500 K, AFAIK). I tried to compensate at the moment by changing the final RGB white balance, but this is probably an inaccurate way to go. Another inaccuracy is I don't do bias removal from the cubes. This likely affects the outcome. Also, I don't use the precise wavelengths the code requires, but use the closest one in the cube. I intend to fix this by interpolating between nearest wavelengths.

All images are enlarged 4x.


The leftmost image is a 4-cube mosaic. The colors in all four frames turned out identical which gives me at least some confidence. The image in the middle shows Dione's disc creeping in front of Saturn. Dione's disc appears elongated probably because as the lines were readout, it moved considerably in its orbit. The rightmost image shows a very overexposed Saturn image, the part below the ring shadows got overexposed. From what I've seen browsing through the PDS, a lot of the cubes are badly overexposed at some wavelengths.

Here's a couple of Jupiter images. I'm not very satisfied with them as they seem to look somewhat greenish, but overall the color looks believeable:



Lastly, two Titan composites. They turned out way more reddish than I thought they would.


It'll be interesting to see how much the results will change once I do a more proper processing pipeline working.

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

I also really like what you are doing. I hope you don't feel I am being discouraging. I am poking at the gamma issue, because I think you might have a bug someplace. Track it down, and then you will have rigorous "true color".

[ugordan]

I hope you don't feel I am being discouraging.

Not at all. There's generally just too much "mystique" about gamma that I rather not mess around with it.
Here's a literal implementation of a 1/2.2 power function in the code:

The above shows nicely why I'm not too fond of gamma manipulations -- the terminator comes out too sharp (you don't get the feeling Jupiter is actually 3D), the colors and contrast are bleached, and it also brings out an ever-present non-dark background.
Hmm... or maybe that means I have to calibrate my monitor...

Here's that Saturn mosaic again:

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Here's a literal implementation of a 1/2.2 power function in the code:

The real-life scene is probably not as saturated with color as a lot of photos show. Your gamma 2.2 images don't look like anything is going wrong in the software at all. I thought perhaps you were seeing something way off.

[ugordan]

A couple of rough Saturn mosaics:

The blob in the middle image is Tethys.

Ring mosaics:



All images magnified 2x and gamma-corrected.

[Malmer]

I think it looks great. Very subtle beautiful colors.

Keep em coming!

/M

[ugordan]

A few Jupiter images, fixed the greenish hue. It was due to my code subtracting out dark background when apparently it was already subtracted from the Jupiter flyby cubes.


The middle and right image were taken not far apart, the rightmost image is much bigger because it utilized a high-resolution mode developed in-flight, it increases the spatial resolution by 3x at a cost of lowering the S/N ratio a bit. The leftmost image is also hi-res, but was taken far before closest approach.

Outbound crescent, 2 cube mosaic:


A couple of Europa transits:

It's a shame the transit on the right didn't catch more area to the left of Jupiter's limb, there was a great grouping of Io and Ganymede there. The rightmost image is actually very close in time to an ISS narrow-angle sequence, taken on January 2nd, 2001.

Again, all images magnified 2x and gamma-corrected.

[Malmer]

A few Jupiter images, fixed the greenish hue. It was due to my code subtracting out dark background when apparently it was already subtracted from the Jupiter flyby cubes.

Just for the sake of inconsistensy



I think it looks great. Fantastic actually. If i had to pick on something i would have to mention the almost invisible residual pattern in the images. faint thin horizontal and vertical lines. some of them seem to show up at the same place in all the images. (sometimes rotated 90 degrees but i guess thats you rotating the images for display) others seem more random. is this due to sensor sensitivity variation and/or does it have to do with the scanning process of the instrument?

Do you write your image processing software for some standard platform (IDL or something) or do you write totally standalone code?

/M

[ugordan]

The vertical stripes (most noticeable is a blue line) in some darker shots... I've checked and double-checked the flatfields and dark background removal code and none of them even touches that. There's a load of them in the raw data, they appear to be static so those are probably hot pixels on the CCD. Since the cubes are readout one line at a time, in a push-broom mode with the spectra of the line being split in the vertical dimension, It means same samples in all lines in a given spectral band will suffer from the same problem. Hence the vertical lines. What I don't understand is why adequate flatfields/dark current models haven't been produced to deal with this. This only affects the visible channel, the IR channel seems fine (note the VIS and IR channels are actually two different physical parts). So far, there's nothing I can do about it.

The code is an ad-hoc implementation in C, it's rudimentary and messy as I progressively modified it from simply trying to read the cubes to do more complex stuff like color matching. It doesn't even output a nice PNG color image, but a raw 64x64 pixel dump with 3 interleaved rgb channels

[Malmer]

I guess you have to make an additional flatfield removal using a homebrewn flatfield. Try simply takeing one row of an image of black space, scale to width of image and remove it from the data and see what it looks like.



/M

[ugordan]

I guess you have to make an additional flatfield removal using a homebrewn flatfield. Try simply takeing one row of an image of black space, scale to width of image and remove it from the data and see what it looks like.

I don't think it's a flatfield problem. Flatfields only correct for varying sensitivity of different pixels. This appears to be primarily a dark current problem - you can see the lines even in dark space which flatfields can't remove. Remember, you divide or multiply the image with a flatfield. This, on the other hand, will obviously need subtracting out. I don't even know where to begin modelling dark current data. The provided dark current model uses a two-parameter table, one a standalone part and the other a variable part multiplied by exposure, for each CCD pixel.
The model seems fine for normal resolution cubes (though even that doesn't completely remove everything), but the hi-res one seems buggy. Furthermore, these Jupiter images where the dark was subtracted by the instrument itself show no apparent signs of those nasty lines. Then again, this could be due to the fact Jupiter images took a 4 times shorter exposure than Saturn targets, because of increased light levels there so dark current didn't have as much time to build up.

A document on the PDS says new models are generated every month or so, but it looks to me the same tables appear on all 8 VIMS DVDs. I mailed one of the guys responsible for the PDS volumes so we'll see what they have to say.