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The VIP image processing system is Copyright (C) 1994 The University
of Western Australia.  VIP may be used freely for research purposes.
Those wishing to use VIP for commercial applications should contact
the Department of Computer Science at The University of Western
Australia.

VIP (Visual Information Processing) is an image processing software
library that has been developed by the Robotics and Vision
Research Group in The Department of Computer Science at The University
of Western Australia.  The system consists of two parts:

1) A library of C functions for manipulating and transforming images
that can be incorporated in your own programs.

2) A set of stand-alone programs for performing many of the more
commonly used operations on images.

The VIP library of image processing functions has been designed to
enable users to create their own image processing programs very
quickly and simply using a toolkit of standardized library
functions.

The library includes functions in the following categories:

- image input/output and memory management
- image type and data format conversion
- image enhancement and spatial transformations
- mask operations
- arithmetic operations
- image statistics
- frequency domain transformations
- camera calibration and 3D data reconstruction
- vector and matrix manipulation
- one dimensional edge detection
- complex arithmetic
- miscellaneous functions


The VIP image data structure supports a wide variety of image types
ranging from a basic 8 bit grey level representation through to
complex valued and colour images.  New image types can be easily added
without `breaking' the existing software.  An additional feature of
the VIP image data structure that distinguishes it from other image
structures is its provision for comprehensive camera calibration data
and lens distortion parameters.  The VIP system provides support for
reconstruction of 3D information from images via structured light and
stereo.

The VIP System is designed to run under Unix on DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc
Machines and PC's running LINUX.  We used to have a subset of VIP
running under DOS however this is no longer maintained and the
conditional compilation flags for DOS are probably broken.  If you are
desperate to run under DOS you will probably have to hack around a bit
and compile it using the huge memory model.



See the README file in the src subdirectory for information regarding
modification to the Makefiles for your own installation.


A full manual for VIP can be found in vip/man/manual.ps



If you have any problems please mail me at pk@cs.uwa.edu.au 

While we will endevour to help you as much as possible, we do not have
the resources to support VIP on a full-time basis and our ability to
help you may be limited.

Good Luck,


Peter Kovesi
Department of Computer Science
The University of Western Australia