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Reindeer Graphics Fovea Pro 2

Fovea Pro is a collection of image analysis Photoshop filters for professionals. Fovea Pro 2 has huge number of filter categories (the IP* submenus), from standard frequency domain analysis, to more complicated shape classification algorithms.

The package is really intended for professionals and educational institutions. Despite this, Fovea Pro 2 comes with one of the most in-depth and superbly written tutorials I've seen. The tutorial is a huge 500-page PDF file on the CD, that covers pretty much every aspect of Fovea Pro 2. The tutorial constantly uses example images (also present on the CD) to show how various techniques can be used. The example images are taken from a large base of industries - such as biology (tissue samples), geography (satellite images) to more traditional images.

The Filters

Looking at all the filters in-depth is impossible, but here is a brief breakdown of all categories and the sort of filters in each category.

IP*Adjust, Boolean and Color

The adjust filters are permutations of the standard Photoshop features, allowing for better constrast and level control. The Boolean filters include standard and, or, not, and exclusive-or as well as an interesting "Feature-AND" that bases its comparison on features present in the images.

The Colour filters present some very interesting features including mapping the colours present in the image on to a colour cube amd all the colour space conversions you'd expect (RGB, LAB, HSV and HSL) as well as colour correction filters.

IP*EDM, Features, FFT

These three categories hold some of the more interesting filters and features of Fovea Pro 2. The EDM (Eucledian Distance Map) has morphological filters like Close, Dilate, Erode, and Open as well as more specific filters like Distance Map, Ultimate Points and Watershed.

The Features category has some very impressive filters, like the "Color by Value" filter. The filter has a huge number of options, from size, position, skeleton length/endpoints/branches, colour factors, number of holes, in fact a total of 57 possible options to choose from! The other Feature filters are similarly fleshed out, allowing you to automatically label features, view distribution graphs, plot graphs combining various image traits and a whole lot more.

The FFT filters are also very complete. Standard FFT/IFFT filters are available, as well as some handy filters to generate useful masks to apply (Hamming, Butterworth etc.). Finally you can use Photoshop to edit an image subtly in the frequency domain before converting it back. FP2 supplies a plethora of other FFT related filters: Harmonics, Convolution, Deconvolution and Read Values (shown below) to name a few.

IP*Graphics, Lines+Points, Math

More very interesting and useful filters available in these categories. The graphics filters allow for a variety of more drastic modifications. For example, the very clever "Surface Render" allows you to generates a 3D image from a greyscale relief map. The filter even allows for a red-cyan image to be produced, allowing to you view your new image with 3D glasses. Below is a picture of some skin cells that have been rendered in 3D:

Other filters such as Relief allow the user to generate relief maps of their images, Phong generates a rendering of the image with an adjustable light source, while other filters allow you to create new images such a "Sine Function" which simply draws a sine function with the parameters you give.

The "Lines and Points" category allows the user to generate a series of reference lines (and points!) such as drawing a magnification bar on the image. The Math menu allows for two images to be combined using a variety of boolean operators and blendings. Most of the functionality seems pretty similar to the various layer combinations that Photoshop natively supports.

IP*Measure, Morphology, Process

The Measure filters allow you to measure everything about your image, from the various brightness values, fractal dimensions, grain size, lengths and much more. Many of the measurement features save their results to text files that can then be imported into a graphing or calculations package like Microsoft Excel. There have actually been many cases when I've wanted to export an image's histogram data, and now I can.

The morphological filters do the same or similar things to their EDM counterparts, but there are a few additional filters present too such as the Fill Holes, Prune and Skeletonize (shown below).

There are a lot of Process filters from edge detectors, texture filters, convolution, blurring, equalization and more. There are four different edge detectors: Frei and Chen, Kirsch, Sobel Magnitude, Stochastic Edge and Variance. The convolution filter is quick and very effective, allowing you to load in your own custom kernel from a simple text file. The filter handles kernels up to 95x95 and can autoscale the results.

IP*Rank, Surfaces, Threshold, Utilities

The Rank category has all the filters you'd expect (Median, Minimum and Maximum) as well as some more advanced filters like Hit-and-Miss, Rolling Ball and Top-hat. Performance is relatively good, but not on par with Photoshop's Median filter (1280x960, 24-bit took 1.1 seconds using Photoshop's median filter, while Fovea Pro took 5.4 seconds on a PIII-933, 512Mb RAM). Nevertheless, this isn't a big issue, and Fovea Pro offers much greater control over the filter's behaviour.

Surfaces filters contains some incredibly powerful filters for analyzing surfaces of all kinds. The tutorial steps through examples of how the surfaces filters can be used to drastically improve the image quality of images acquired by microscopes and similar instruments.

The Threshold category has virtually every sort of thresholding you could wish for, from simple binary thresholding, to more complex contouring, to isolines (displayed right), skeleton-based thresholding and more.

Problems

Fovea Pro is a fantastic package, but it isn't without its problems. Firstly, I had a lot of problems with the filters initially. I kept receiving "Cannot write to disk" errors, which Reindeer Graphics then told me had to do with Fovea Pro writing to the root of C-drive. Our test computer didn't have a C-drive! I therefore had to remount a drive as C so the filters would work. While most people have a C-drive, this can also cause problems with networked/shared computers if you don't have write access to the root. The Fovea Pro tutorial does come with an appendix that details how to circumvent this problem (although this also requires a one-time write access to C-drive too). Either way, this is fairly shoddy and the filters should really use the user's temporary folder or allow users to change the directory in the IP*Utilities category or even the registry.

The rest of the problems were relatively minor, but added up. The interfaces could have done with a little tweaking here and there to conform a bit more to Photoshop and Windows standards. Filters sometimes failed, or required certain conditions that they didn't warn of, and instead of popping up meaningful error messages, they just didn't do anything. Meaningful error messages really are necessary when dealing with some as complicated as image filtering. On a similar note, there was no online help which would have really been appreciated. The tutorial is great but it isn't organized as a help file, so you can get an immediate reference of any particular filter.

Conclusion

Overall though, Fovea Pro 2 is incredibly impressive. The filters are very useful, efficient, well-implemented and have a huge range of options and neat features. The filters are all 16/48-bit capable, ensuring no loss of information when analyzing scientific images. The tutorial is another great plus, really adding to the overall value of the package.

Fovea Pro's only major shortcoming is the reliance on a C-drive but that aside, it is an indispensable and solid group of filters for professionals and academics alike.

8.4

Price: $799.95

Liked: Large number of high-quality filters, 16-bit channel capable, superb tutorial, Mac/Win filters on the same CD.

Disliked: Errors not all that meaningful, UI could do some tweaking, no online help, reliance on C:\.

Website: http://www.reindeergraphics.com/

Submitted: 12/06/2002

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