The Image File System (IFS) Software

The objective of quickly writing good imaging software can be accomplished by using the image access subroutines in IFS. IFS is a collection of subroutines and applications based on those subroutines that support the development of image processing software in C and C++. Advantages of IFS Advantages of IFS include bullIFS supports any data type including char, unsigned char, short, unsigned short, int, unsigned int, float, double, complex float, complex double, complex short, and structure. • IFS supports any image size, and any number of dimensions. One may do signal processing by simply considering a signal as a one-dimensional image. • IFS is available on most current computer systems, includingWindows on the PC, Linux on the PC, and OS-X on the Macintosh. Files written on one platform may be read on any of the other platforms. Conversion to the format native to the platform is done by the read routine, without user intervention. • A large collection of functions are available, including two-dimensional Fourier transforms, filters, segmenters, etc. The IFS Header Structure All IFS images include a header that contains various items of information about the image, such as the number of points in the image, the number of dimensions for the image, the data format, the units and scan direction of each dimension, and so on. Also associated with the image is the actual data for the image. The image header includes a pointer to the image data. The user manipulates an image by calling some function in the IFS library; one of the arguments to the function will be the address of the header. From the information in the header, the IFS library functions automatically determine where the data is and how to access it. In addition to accessing data in images, the IFS routines automatically take care of allocating space in memory to store data and headers. Everything is totally dynamic in operation; there are no fixed-dimension arrays. This relieves the user of the difficulties involved with accessing data in arrays, when the arrays are not of some fixed size.