Pixcavator 4.2 released
Download the new version or first read a bit about the background.
Besides a few minor improvements, the main novelty is more ways to change the analysis settings. There are six sliders now.

As before we have two sliders for the two main measurements – size and contrast. Now, the confusingly named “Max growth rate” has been remade into “Border contrast”. What does it mean? Both this and the second slider consider the difference in intensity inside the object from that of the surrounding area. But, while the contrast slider considers the maximal difference throughout the object (that why it’s now called Max contrast), the border contrast slider looks at the area just inside the contour. The result is about the same as before: it detects sharp edges, i.e. the contours with the largest difference between what’s just inside and what’s just onside of it.

The next slider works similarly but takes into account the average difference in intensity inside the object from that of the surrounding area. It’s called Average contrast.
The last two sliders simply threshold the image. For example, if you set Intensity, dark to 100, the contours of dark objects will the intensity equal to exactly 100. If you set Intensity, light to 100, the contours of light objects will the intensity equal to exactly 155 (here 155=255-100). It was set this way in order to ensure that contours grow as you move any of the six sliders from left to right. This is a very unsophisticated tool but it’s quite effective when the image lighting is uniform.
The need for introducing these new tools came from a specific, real life image analysis task: Measuring staining in the liver.
Reminder to the current customers: you can download the new version and activate it with your current serial number.
Reminder to the rest: the new price $195 won’t become effective until June 15.





Hi there,
First off, I have to say that the software you’re developing is great–the math behind it is intuitively clear, and the version 4.2 is incredibly user friendly.
Second, I was wondering if a couple of the behaviors I’ve found in the software are “features” rather than bugs. Specifically, I’ve noticed that…
- When adding a border to an image to provide edge contrast and allow more accurate counting, the border only seems to be added to the top and left edges of images.
- The “marked contour” counter only seems to go up to 300, although the list of objects can contain much larger numbers of objects.
Cheers!
Thanks for the compliments and the feedback.
The first one must be a bug… It would help me a lot if you can describe the circumstances of this so that I can reproduce it. My email is saveliev@inperc.com.
The second one isn’t a bug but I can’t say it’s a feature either. I just haven’t been able to come up with a better way of handling this dilemma: as I move a slider I definitely want both the contours and the summary statistics (and the table) to be updated instantly, but it’s just too slow… So I just imposed this limit – you are the only one who noticed so far!
–Peter