Download TiViPE - Tino`s Visual Programming Environment

specified by 5 dimensions and one out of 10 supported data
types), they are subdivided into five different groups. The
first four groups cover the general aspects of arithmetic,
data manipulation, input/output, and visualization.
The arithmetic group contains, bitwise, comparison, single and double operand, trigonometry and standard mathematical function operations. On complex data the following
modules are available: splitting of real and imaginary part,
polar-complex coordinate conversion, complex conjugate,
and any normal datatype to complex conversion.
The data manipulation group contains routines for conversion from one datatype to another, and to normalize, reduce, append, cut, and pad data.
The input/output group contains routines, to read and
write the Data5D data structure and images in 8 different
formats.
Visualization contains modules to display or animate
data.
Around 30 different modules for image processing are
available. These modules were used for research purposes,
they include color manipulation, data manipulation, filtering, graph extraction, image operations, image input and
output, and early vision operators.
4
Discussion
TiViPE is a visual programming environment, it provides both an application environment and a software development environment for data processing, analysis, exploration, and visualization. The TiViPE environment has
been designed to enable efficient collaboration among people with different backgrounds and interests. Within the environment this is achieved by emphasizing on ease-of-use,
scalability, and extensibility. For example, all applications
used within TiViPE, including those generated by you and
others with the TiViPE environment, can transparently access arbitrarily data structures, distributed across a network.
TiViPE aims at different user groups:
1. All users will be able to program by using ready modules and constructing a network of these modules.
2. Programmers will in common avoid to use a graphical
environment if the effort is too big, to wrap an existing
routine. The only effort needed in TiViPE to wrap an
existing routine is to fill out a set of 10 forms. TiViPE
will then generate the code needed for the icon and
compile the code to a stand alone program. Programmers will benefit from the existing modules in TiViPE
that will give them the opportunity to re-use existing
code in a simple way.
3. Researchers will find TiViPE very beneficial for performing experiments, since it allows simple and rapid
parameter modification.
TiViPE supports parallel programming and allows interaction with a running program. Its graphical structure gives
a developer a natural debugging tool, therefore TiViPE is
suitable for critical processes that can be applied in fields
like robotics and computational neuroscience.
The graphical programming environment TiViPE will
make programming faster and easier! TiViPE makes other
library routines accessible through its graphical environment. Construction of a network is a matter of selecting
icons from a menu and connecting them. Compounding
such a network to a new module is performed by pressing a
single button, TiViPE will re-use the code of all the modules
in the network and generate a new module. The ease of creating a new module and the re-use of existing code will lead
to the availability of a respectable number of modules, that
in turn can be used by others. This is the way to have many
developers using TiViPE as their environment and sharing
the constructed modules.
References
[1] Agilent Technologies Inc. Vee Pro User’s Guide, 2000.
[2] P. T. Cox, F. R. Giles, and T. Pietrzykowski. Prograph: A
step toward liberating the programmer from textual conditioning. In IEEE Workshop in Visual Languages, pages 150–
156, 1989.
[3] R. Helsel. Visual Programming with HP VEE. Prentice Hall
PTR, 1997.
[4] T. Lourens. http://www.dei.brain.riken.go.jp/emilia/Collaboration/Tino/TiViPE/index.html. TiViPE Download, 2004.
[5] T. Lourens and R. P. Würtz. Extraction and matching
of symbolic contour graphs. International Journal of
Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (IJPRAI),
17(7):1279–1302, November 2003.
[6] B. Lucas, G. D. Abram, N. S. Collins, D. A. Epstein, D. L.
Greesh, and K. P. McAuliffe. An architecture for a scientific visualization system. In Proceedings of Visualization
’92, pages 107–114. IEEE Computer Society Press, October
1992.
[7] National Instruments. LabView User Manual, 2003.
[8] M. F. Sanner, D. Stoffler, and A. J. Olson. Viper a visual
programming environment for python. In 10th International
Python Conference, February 2002.
[9] C. Upson, J. T. Faulhaber, D. Kamins, D. Laidlaw,
D. Schlegel, J. Vroom, R. Gurwitz, and A. van Dam. The
application visualization system: A computational environment for scientific visualization. IEEE Computer Graphics
and Applications, 9(4):32–40, July 1989.
[10] P. F. Whelan and D. Molloy. Machine Vision Algorithms
in Java: Techniques and Implementation. Springer-Verlag,
London, 2000.
[11] K. N. Whitley and A. E. Blackwell. Visual programming
in the wild: A survey of labview programmers. Journal of
Visual Languages and Computing, 12(4):435–472, 2001.
[12] M. Young, D. Argiro, and S. Kubica. Cantata: Visual programming environment for the khoros system. Computer
Graphics, 29(2):22–24, May 1995.