New JPEG2000 viewer for HiRISE images Options

[DataMiner]

Hi Folks,

The HiRISE team has been working on an improved image viewer/data explorer for our JPEG2000 imagery. We'd like to offer you all the chance to try out the release candidate before our public release next week, if you'd like to give it try. The new software is called HiView and can be downloaded from the HiRISE website.

For those of you that are interested: HiView is a platform native application (not java like the IAS Viewer), and as such it is a bit faster and more responsive. The performance using the jpip protocol is somewhat better than the IAS Viewer, and we are continuing to work on improving that. We are also continuing to develop the software. At this time, the software more or less matches the feature set of the IAS Viewer (panning/zooming and color/contrast stretching), but future versions will also include measurement tools and the like as well.

It should be noted that we will not be continuing to distribute the IAS viewer software after the end of this month, but we think HiView is a big enough improvement over the IAS Viewer that we hope nobody will be disappointed by that.

We'll be happy to hear any feedback that you can give us on this. The software is available for OSX, Linux, and Windows.

Enjoy!

[Phil Stooke]

Excellent! Thanks for this. One thing that would be useful for me would be the ability to view the image at some intermediate zoom level, then outline an area by dragging a box, and download the selected area at full resolution.

(On looking more at your page, this may already be allowed...)

Phil

[elakdawalla]

Phil, I think the way to do this is to make the FOV of the viewer match the area you want to export. Then select Save and in the Save dialog you can specify the pixel scale (in multiples of pixel sizes, 1 = full scale) you want. Which is AWESOME.

A feature request: I would love it if you could optionally have it place a scale bar on the view, or export a scale bar as a second file when you save a cropped image. Various customization of that would be nice but even just a rectangular bar of white pixels with a length of 5m or 10m or 20m or ... (dynamically chosen depending on the pixel width of the exported image) ... would be a major help. It's a real pain to export an image, go to the HiRISE website, look up the pixel scale, figure out what length of a scale bar I should use, open the exported jpeg, draw the scale bar, and resave it as a jpeg (ugh), before uploading it to my website's image library where it'll get jpeg-compressed a third time to produce the smaller inline versions.

[DataMiner]

Excellent! Thanks for this. One thing that would be useful for me would be the ability to view the image at some intermediate zoom level, then outline an area by dragging a box, and download the selected area at full resolution.

(On looking more at your page, this may already be allowed...)

Hi Phil,

Unfortunately, that isn't a capability the software currently supports. The navigator window does superimpose a box on the thumbnail image indicating the portion of the full image that is currently being viewed (and you can grab the box in the navigator window and use it to pan around). However it won't download and save the currently viewed area at full resolution, it will only save at the resolution that is currently being viewed.

Such a capability is possible, and it is a feature that we have discussed off and on for years in different contexts (not just for HiView), but we haven't quite figured out how to resolve certain technical difficulties associated with the capability. For HiView the problem is that, depending on the size of the box you've chosen, you may have just committed yourself to downloading over a gigabyte of data without realizing it. Having said that, we are interested in adding some functionality to HiView that will more or less do what you are suggesting, but it is difficult to say when that feature will make it into the application.

[ElkGroveDan]

The HiRISE team has been working on an improved image viewer/data explorer for our JPEG2000 imagery. ....... The new software is called HiView and can be downloaded from the HiRISE website.

After you've introduced a few more versions will it be known as HIFive?

[Phil Stooke]

Emily is right and I just tested it - Dataminer, my needs are met perfectly by just getting the view I need in the main window and then choosing to download at full res in the scale box.

I see what you mean about how somebody could commit to downloading the full thing... maybe an upper limit to the file size is needed!

Phil

[elakdawalla]

Such a capability is possible, and it is a feature that we have discussed off and on for years in different contexts (not just for HiView), but we haven't quite figured out how to resolve certain technical difficulties associated with the capability. For HiView the problem is that, depending on the size of the box you've chosen, you may have just committed yourself to downloading over a gigabyte of data without realizing it. Having said that, we are interested in adding some functionality to HiView that will more or less do what you are suggesting, but it is difficult to say when that feature will make it into the application.

Can you avoid this with warning dialog boxes? Refuse to export images above a certain number of pixels or certain maximum x and/or y dimension, and if a file will contain more than a certain smaller number of pixels, put a WARNING IN CAPS AND RED LETTERS THAT THE FILE WILL BE LARGER THAN NN MB? Hubble's website makes you jump through hoops and acknowledge that you know what you're getting in to before you can download their full-resolution data.

[DataMiner]

Phil, I think the way to do this is to make the FOV of the viewer match the area you want to export. Then select Save and in the Save dialog you can specify the pixel scale (in multiples of pixel sizes, 1 = full scale) you want. Which is AWESOME.

A feature request: I would love it if you could optionally have it place a scale bar on the view, or export a scale bar as a second file when you save a cropped image. Various customization of that would be nice but even just a rectangular bar of white pixels with a length of 5m or 10m or 20m or ... (dynamically chosen depending on the pixel width of the exported image) ... would be a major help. It's a real pain to export an image, go to the HiRISE website, look up the pixel scale, figure out what length of a scale bar I should use, open the exported jpeg, draw the scale bar, and resave it as a jpeg (ugh), before uploading it to my website's image library where it'll get jpeg-compressed a third time to produce the smaller inline versions.

Hi Emily,

Unfortunately, changing the pixel scale there won't quite do what you're suggesting. Changing the pixel scale changes the current scaling of the displayed image. If you try to save after changing the scale, I think HiView will probably wait until the scale of the display has updated before saving. So it won't save the larger selected area at the higher resolution that you've selected.

As for scale bars.... We haven't spec'd out just exactly how the GUI will change with regard to this just yet, but our highest priority for the next round of development is for HiView to read the PDS label to get the scale and map projection information and apply it to the displayed image. That is the capability that scale bars and measurement tools will depend on.

[DataMiner]

After you've introduced a few more versions will it be known as HIFive?

Actually, the telemetry analysis tool we use for monitoring HiRISE is already named Hi5!

[DataMiner]

Can you avoid this with warning dialog boxes? Refuse to export images above a certain number of pixels or certain maximum x and/or y dimension, and if a file will contain more than a certain smaller number of pixels, put a WARNING IN CAPS AND RED LETTERS THAT THE FILE WILL BE LARGER THAN NN MB? Hubble's website makes you jump through hoops and acknowledge that you know what you're getting in to before you can download their full-resolution data.

In principle, yes, I think that is the approach we want to take. Things get tricky with JPEG2000 though, I'm not sure how much of the size information HiView can get to at a given resolution, although we probably can make some kind of reasonable estimate about what the size will be. We probably won't be able to give an exact value, but it would be good enough for warning purposes.

[Phil Stooke]

"Unfortunately, changing the pixel scale there won't quite do what you're suggesting. "

I did a test save, and I'm sure it is saving at the requested pixel scale, not just blowing the displayed screen up to the size you ask for (which would be kind of a waste of time!) I was viewing at 0.19 scale, requested saving at 1.0 scale, and got a beautifully crisp image about 6000 by 4000 pixels. I think it's doing what it says it's doing.

Phil

[DataMiner]

Hmm... Well, that's an unexpected feature. I don't think it was intended to work that way. I'll talk to our developer about it. (Not to change that behavior but just to make sure that is what is supposed to happen).

[Phil Stooke]

I can't really see any point to doing it the other way, just enlarging what's on the screen. Anyway, right now it's perfect and I love you all! (in a good way, not a creepy way)

Phil

[DataMiner]

I just talked to the programmer and he said that this is indeed how he intended it to work, so that was a feature that got slipped in without my realizing it.

[elakdawalla]

It would have been my absolute number one feature request, so if this were the only improvement made between IAS Viewer and HiView, I would have been well satisfied! Please thank your programmer very much for me!