The Image Understanding Environment (IUE)

Image Understanding Environment (IUE)

The IUE is an object-oriented class library designed to support
research in machine vision and image understanding. It is
implemented in C++.

The Image Understanding Environment (IUE) project is a five year
program, sponsored by ARPA, to develop a common object-oriented software environment for the development of algorithms and application systems. The primary purpose of the IUE is to facilitate exchange of research results within the Image Understanding (IU) community. The IUE will provide a platform for various demonstrations and tools for ARPA applications. These demonstrations and tools will become a primary channel for IU technology transfer. The IUE will also serve as a conceptual standard for IU data models and algorithms. The availability of standard implementations for basic IU algorithms will facilitate performance evaluation of new techniques and to track progress in algorithm improvements. The IUE is designed to support significant evolution of IU approaches and an effective programming environment for rapid prototyping. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide a software infrastructure of class hierarchies, user interface tools, and IU algorithms that are required to carry out state of the art research in image understanding. The goals of the IUE are to provide:

Research Productivity: through a standard object-oriented interface for the development and sharing of IU software.

Technology Transfer: via a platform for demonstrating the benefits of IU algorithms in the context of user application models.

Education/Development: support by providing a consistent and standardized format for encoding IU algorithms which is suitable for teaching and as a base for further development of IU technology.

Computational Models: that provide the basic data representations and associated operations which any IU architecture must support

The UK IUE Project

The potential benefits for the UK Image Understanding community to exchange code and results by adopting a common environment has not been missed by EPSRC. A UK evaluation project has been funded which will attempt to ensure that the IUE will provide the functionality needed by UK vision research groups. A number of sites (including Manchester) (Spoke Sites) have been funded to implement vision research applications using the IUE. The primary goal is to assess the IUE design and thus contribute to the design and implementation of the IUE. UK requirements will be identified and new IUE-compatible classes will be added to the IUE as a result.Manchester also performs a co-ordinating role (Hub Site), to prevent duplication of effort and to provide assistance and support for UK users.

The spoke sites are:

United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St. Thomas'
Hospitals
University College London
University of Birmingham
University of Sussex
University of Surrey
Heriot Watt University
Oxford University
Manchester University (Wolfson Image Analysis Unit)

Using the IUE

The IUE will be a large environment containing many well-known vision algorithms and, we hope, well-designed data structures. It is still undergoing design changes. The best way to ensure that it will contain what you may need for your applications is to try and use it and give feedback to the developers at AAI. So, even if you are not involved in the UK project, and if you think that the IUE may be of benefit to your research in the future then you are strongly recommnded to install it and try it out. You will need a reasonably powerful machine, eg a Sparc20/UltraSparc with 1Gb disc and 64Mb memory. IUE will also run on a suitable PC using Linux. An NT port is planned.

Acknowledgements

EPSRC: for providing funding. Amerinex Applied Imaging: for the logo.

UK IUE PROJECT

Contacts

David Cooper:
Amerinex (AAI): http://www.aai.com/AAI/IUE/IUE.html

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