I decided to rename the wiki, from “Computer Vision Wiki” to “Computer Vision Primer”. “Wiki” is just such a general (and generic) term that it is easy to confuse our wiki with other wikis related to computer vision. The word “primer” helps to make a point about what makes ours different – we focus on the fundamentals and try to keep it very accessible. CVprimer.com is also easy to remember. Finally, when I get to turn this into a book, Computer Vision Primer will be a good title.

There have been some additions to the wiki. I did quite a lot of editing throughout, for example, Overview. I started to add articles on measurements of objects: saliency, mass, average contrast, diameter, minor and major axes, Euler number, Robustness of geometry and topology. Those are still quite thin. In article Machine learning in computer vision I summarized the recent blog posts on the subject. There are also many red links – those are articles I plan to write.

Pixcavator PE (photo editing) is to be released in just a few weeks. It is a simplified version of the image analysis version but it will also have a couple of new features. These features and many more will appear in Pixcavator 2.5.

cellAnalyst has now an online counterpart. You can upload your images, analyze them, save the data, and search images - all in your browser. Create your free account here. Feedback will be appreciated… Meanwhile, AssaySoft has been incorporated.

From the three previous posts on the topic (Lengths of digital curves, parts 1, 2, 3) and a little presentation I gave recently I created an article for the wiki. In comparison, analysis is more extensive and there are more illustrations. At the end there are two examples of computation of roundness with Pixcavator 2.4. Circles have roundness close to 90, squares close to 80. It works quite well for large objects. You can now distinguish between circles and squares and between squares and elongated objects. For example, you have now a new way to automatically count (round) cells in the image and ignore (rough edged) noise.

• We hit 20,000 downloads! About 5,000 are downloads of Pixcavator 2.3. So far no complaints about any serious bugs. In reality there are some problems with the measurements of light objects. They are being fixed.
• Article on measuring objects was added. It makes more precise what is being computed, especially for gray scale images. More examples will be added.

• Article on Objects in gray scale images was added, also for binary images. I continue with the plan of giving more details to the description of main algorithm (Binary Images and Grayscale Images), but in separate articles. This approach gives more flexibility to the reader (and the writer).
• Article on Image Search was extended and isn’t “under construction” anymore.
• I started on the Pixcavator Tutorial focused on scientific image analysis.
• Under “computer vision for beginners”, the wiki is #2 on Google. Cool…

Last week:

• The article on Cell Decomposition of Images was added. The approach is explained in detail and its advantages over the graph representation of binary images are also discussed. The latter topic is interesting on its own. It should be addressed as a part of a broader issue – continuous v. discrete. Maybe one day…
• The article on Related Approaches was expanded significantly. I added some examples and even some (limited) discussion of literature.
• The slide show on the binary algorithm was added to the main page of the wiki. Thanks Ash!
• The demo program for the analysis of binary images was made available too. It is the program explained in this article.

Last week
·        A short page was added under “For researchers” – How it works. It gives an initial idea of how and why Pixcavator works with a link to the wiki. Hopefully, there will be a link to a paper here in the near future.
·        The article on Binary Images is mostly finished, pending feedback. I’ve made good progress with Grayscale Images too.
·        I started to add answers to exercises. The wiki is starting to take a shape of an online textbook. Interesting…
·        A PowerPoint slide show was added that explains the basics of our approach. It will be updated regularly until it takes the form of a paper.
·        We’ve had technical difficulties with the blog…

Last week:

• An instructional video was added. A bit crude but should help the user to learn how to use Pixcavator for image analysis.
• The article on analysis of binary images was significantly expanded and improved. There is still a need for more examples and illustrations. Grayscale Images needs even more work.
• The article Topological Features of Images was rewritten and now is more or less complete. It’s an introduction to topological analysis in 3D.
• The articles on homology are in progress.

The site is mostly complete now. At least everything is operational. The last additions are: this blog, the image gallery, and the wiki. 

The blog is still thin, but at least it’s current. Note that the older posts came from the blog-like page of the old site. 

The image gallery has more than 250 images arranged in 9 albums: Medical, Image manipulation, Watercolors, Industrial machine vision, Biometrics, Microscopy, Maps, Test images, and Material Science. They contain examples of image analysis and manipulation with Pixcavator and a few comparisons to other software. There is a need for more - everybody is welcome to contribute. 

The wiki has plenty of content now. It started with four chapters from the book draft but now has grown beyond that. There is a thorough explanation of methods, with code snippets for illustration. Now we have added some complete code as well a description of the SDK (in progress). Initially the intent was to concentrate on developers, now it seems to make sense to add articles about how Pixcavator is applied in specific areas of scientific image analysis. Right now microscopy and cell counting seem the most promising.