Friday, July 1, 2016

Image Processing with ImageJ

Recently, the discipline of imaging has come to play an important role in multiple research areas, leading to many of the professionals in these research areas to use image processing software. One increasingly popular - though quite old - image processing software is ImageJ. ImageJ is well known for being a public domain software that can run on any operating system. In addition to this, ImageJ appeals to users with its imaging manipulation capabilities as well as its reliable and immense user community that creates a forever expanding web of ideas and innovation.

Being a public domain software means that ImageJ is free, and anyone can download and use it license-free. This automatically makes it a popular choice among the other image processing software, the current rate (at the time this article was written) of download being about 24,000 downloads each month. The fact that ImageJ is able to be run on any operating system is also quite a feat, making it more available to anyone who wishes to use it.

Unlike other image processing software, ImageJ has a vast amount of imaging capabilities, which are continually expanding. These capabilities include the support of all common image manipulations, basic and more sophisticated operations, mathematical operations, visualization operations, and surface and volume rendering. In addition to the core capabilities of the software, extensions are also available online made by other users. These extensions include macros, which make it easier to automate repeated tasks and plug-ins, which are external programs that offer additional image processing capabilities. These programs have made ImageJ extremely helpful to many researchers, especially in the science and engineering fields.

One aspect of ImageJ that really keeps it relevant to modern needs and well-updated is that fact that is has an immense user community that offers extensions to the software as well as guidance. Because ImageJ is a public domain software, there is no hotline for problems, giving way for users across the world to open up about different solutions and ask questions to each other. This has really contributed to ImageJ - despite being a 6 year old software - to continually evolve as time moves on and keep its functions updated with modern technology. As such, ImageJ is still used today in many research facilities, serving both the engineering and science fields well.

-Patricia Acorda


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