pro

Release Notes 3.1

Introduction

This document describes changes and improvements in version 3.1 of the amira product line.

We are pleased to announce the release of Amira 3.1. It offers expanded functionality and increased performance.
Some of the new features and benefits include:

Improved multi-modal automatic registration and multi-modal viewing
New powerful tools for creating animations and movies
New features for image segmentation and label interpolation
Improved slice alignment and new image processing filters
Improved I/O for SEG-Y, Leica, VRML, and JPEG formats
Better support for time-dependent data in AVS and Leica formats
amiraVR: improved 3D menus, new tools for easy setup of VR environments
amiraVR: cluster edition for driving multisegment displays by a cluster of graphics computers (available for all platforms)
amiraDev: greatly improved build system and C++ API
Support of the new 64-bit Itanium2 platform with Red Hat Linux
Documentation: more examples, new tutorials, improved Tcl reference material

Supported Platforms

Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP (recommended Windows 2000/XP)
Linux (RedHat 8.0)
Linux Itanium 64 (RedHat AW 2.1)
HP-UX 11.0, 32/64 bit code
SGI Irix 6.5.x, 32/64 bit code
SUN Solaris 8 or 9 (SunOS 5.8 or 5.9), 32/64 bit code

Details about Software and Hardware configuration are listed in the section "System Requirements" of the User's Guide included in this distribution.

In order to add custom extensions to amira also a C++ compiler is also required. Details about the supported compilers and compiler versions can be found in the section "System Requirements" of the Programmer's Guide included in the amira developer version.

Windows: Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio .NET 2003
Linux: gcc 3.2.x
Linux Itanium 64: gcc 2.96
HP-UX 11.0: aCC 3.35 with new C++ standard lib
SGI Irix 6.5.x: CC MIPSpro 7.3.1
SUN Solaris 8: CC Workshop 6

Changes Since amira 3.0

Changes in amira Standard Edition:

New: Support for Linux Itanium 64
Slice aligner: Also works on LargeDiskData objects, which are not stored completely in main memory, better interpolation when resampling images, new resize option allowing the result to be bigger than the input image, new edge-based alignment algorithm, better performance and quality of the least-squares alignment algorithm by means of a hierarchical optimization strategy
Direct volume rendering with the Voltex module: Instead of palette textures a pixel shader program is used now yielding higher quality images for high-frequency colormaps, support of compressed textures if available
StandardView module: Now also supports RGBA color images, also a second 3D data set can be superimposed by means of blending, add or max intensity operations, or a checkerboard display
New module for multi-modal image registration. For example, CT and MR data can be aligned easily. Different criteria such as least squares or normalized mutual information are available. This module is explained in a new tutorial.
New reader for the SEG-Y data format.
Extended support for the Leica confocal image format (multi-channel images and time-dependent data)
New image filters: Existing filters have been revised and new filters such as Gauss 2D or Sobel filters have been added. All filters now can not only be applied in an editor but also in a compute module.
New semi-automatic segmentation tools: The segmentation editor provides active contours that move automatically towards the object boundaries.
Script objects: more examples for writing amira script objects, ready-to-use script objects for creating and playing back demos (DemoMaker and DemoSequence). An online documentation for script objects can be created.
Improved movie maker: support for creating stereo movies
Improved stereo movie player: it can convert a movie consisting of a sequence of separate image files into a compressed-texture format suitable for fast playback.
New module to generate arbitrary parametric surfaces from analytical expressions.
New module ConePlot to visualize vector fields by animated cones.
New system information dialog: version information of all amira components now can be easily obtained, including a list of installed patches
Improved JPEG output, added Tcl variable AmiraJPEGQuality (0...100)
Improved IO of ply files (endianess issues, colors per vertex)
Support for AVS UCD files with time-dependent data
InterpolateLabels: improved quality of the interpolated data, can now also be applied to label fields with stacked coordinates
Extended export of reconstructed 3D models in VRML
New module SurfaceCut that displays cross-sections through surfaces separating different regions. Each region in the cross-section is filled and displayed with its respective color. Previously, similar cuts could only be computed for volumetric tetrahedral grids.
Two new items have been added to the File menu, allowing to quickly reload the files and networks which have been accessed most recently (Recent Files, Recent Networks).
Improved documentation of global amira-specific Tcl commands. All these commands now listed in a common reference section in the user's guide.
Includes all patches for amira 3.0 and many more bug fixes

Changes in amiraDev:

New: Support for Visual Studio .NET 2003 (VC71)
A new, fully automatic system that creates GNUmakefiles, Visual Studio 6 project files, and Visual Studio .NET 2003 project files.
AmiraDev is now based on Open Inventor 4.0 and uses new platform-independent SoQt classes instead of SoWin classes on Windows and SoXt classes on Unix
Strict separation between Hx* classes not depending on Qt and Qx* classes depending on Qt (implies renaming of some previously undocumented amira classes)
Headers of more amira packages are included now: hximproc providing access to the amira image filters, hxvertexset providing access to the amira sphere rendering node
New tool doc2html allows to create an online documentation for custom modules and IO routines. A new section in the programmer's guide explains how to create such documentation.

Changes in amiraVR:

New amiraVR cluster extension, allowing to run amira on a graphics cluster driving a multi-wall display system. This extension allows it to start multiple instances of amira in a synchronized way. Each instance is responsible for rendering one particular wall or set of walls. It is possible to load standard amira networks and to interact with the modules via the 3d menus or via the amira script interface.
Improved mouse interaction for standard amiraVR. In both planar and non-planar configurations you can now interact with the 2D mouse without any restrictions (pick slices, move draggers, etc.). Event processing for screens on a remote display is much faster now.
Improved 3d menus: Possibility to customize the top-level menu, and not only the user menu. Possibility to interact with the 2d mouse in a VR config.
Improved amiraVR API: An easy way to define geometry in fixed world coordinates in a module, a new class HxVREnvironment allowing to access all parameters of the current VR configuration from a user module.
More demo modules, illustrating how to interpret Open Inventor tracker events and controller button events, and how use multiple trackers.