iceWing

iceWing is an Integrated Communication Environment Which Is Not Gesten (this is a reference to an older program, the predecessor of iceWing) is a graphical plugin shell. It is optimized for, but not limited to, image processing and vision system development.

Predefined or self-written plugins operate hierarchically on data provided by other plugins and can also generate new data-streams. An important predefined plugin is the grabbing plugin, which can read images from the disk in various image formats, videos from the disk, from grabber-hardware, e.g. V4L2-devices or FireWire, and also from external, network wide processes.

Besides plugin management, iceWing also supports comfortable rendering of any data in any number of windows. All interactions with the windows, like panning, zooming, introspection, or saving, are handled by iceWing.

Additionally, a comfortable user interface creation is provided, where the complete handling of the interface elements is taken over by iceWing. This includes saving and loading of all widget settings and all window settings and positions at any time.

What is new in this release:

• Many more cameras are supported, e.g. GenICam cameras via the aravis library, more V4L2 cameras, and cameras from IDS.
• A GUI for changing different grabber properties on the fly is provided.
• Support for OpenCV 2.x was enhanced.
• Plugins can now register callbacks for all widgets.
• The newest versions of all the dependencies are supported.

What is new in version 0.10:

• New CMake based build system (CMakeLists.txt, cmake/, ...).
• pkg-config support.
• Optionally support GTK V2.x, GTK V1.2 is as well still supported. Assume UTF-8 if GTK V2.x is used.
• Renamed the page 'Other' to 'GrabImage1'.
• Added main menu to the main iceWing window; moved 'Quit' and buttons from the 'Other' page to the menu.
• All main menu entries and most of the image context menu items can be remote controlled.
• The planes, which are rendered in image windows (normally 0 or 0, 1, 2) can be freely changed.
• Changed default color space for the "-sp" option to RGB.
• Added 'Close Window' to the image context menus.
• Draw histogram tips in a different color.
• Info Window:
• New layout.
• Display of the 'grab' point in the image windows.
• Possibility to average the color across a square area.
• Support pattern matching for setting widgets.
• Extended movie support:
• Added support for writing RAW444, RAW420, FFV1, and MPEG4 encoded video files to the main program and the record plugin.
• Allow reading and writing of RAW444 and RAW420 movies without any external dependencies.
• Expand instead of crop MJPEG's to a size divisible by 16.
• Support saving of PNG (JPEG) images, if the source image has more than 4 (3) planes.
• Added display of the icewing.pdf manual to the help menu.
• Support all Latin-1 glyphs for text rendering.
• Enhanced plugins page in the "Plugin info" window:
• List all installed plugins.
• Allow to filter the displayed plugins.
• Show plugin name, arguments, and help message.
• Arguments for new plugin instances can be specified.
• Plugins are searched, and can be installed, additionally at ${ICEWING_PLUGIN_PATH}/plugins/ (colon separated variable) and ~/.icewing/plugins/.
• Possibility to specify plugin dependencies ("ident", "ident()", and "ident(plugs)") for plug_observ_data() and plug_observ_data_remove().
• Added native INET sockets based communication protocol to the remotectrl plugin and the icewing-control program.
• Allow to specify mnemonics ('_'), accelerators (''), and stock icons ('') for menus.
• iceWing option "-d" now only disables the process() function.
• New plugin shmdata to distribute data via shared memory and local sockets to other local processes.
• Extended record plugin:
• Support saving of >8bit PPM images.
• Support for new movie encodings RAW444, RAW420, FFV1, and MPEG4.
• Use the second thread for movie saving.
• Allow to save images of different plugins in different movie files.
• Do not parse ".gtkrc" (the GTK lib does it already), but parse "~/.icewing/gtkrc".
• The grabber device options can be changed during runtime.
• New bayer decoding method: Adaptive homogeneity-directed interpolation.
• Stereo decoding for 16 bit mono source images.
• Added new MATRIX VISION impact acquire grabbing driver.
• Enhanced firewire driver:
• Support format 7 (partial image grabbing modes).
• Support version 2 of the libdc1394 library.
• Enhanced V4L2 driver:
• Support resolutions greater than 768 x 576.
• Support printing / setting the video standard.
• Support more camera properties (control class and ones with none continuous IDs).
• noselect option to work around a zoran kernel driver bug.
• Stereo and bayer decoding.
• Support for the MJPEG pixel format.
• Stereo and bayer decoding for the unicap driver.
• Escape closes most of the dialogs.
• New plugins chapter, new program chapter, and more complete index in the documentation.
• Bug fixes:
• Ignore all modifier keys besides shift and control for the page select hotkey.
• Fixed possible deadlock if no hotkey for an option page could be found.
• Fixed option parsing for the alpha camera driver.
• Fixed '-x' for the remotectrl plugin.
• Use the quality setting in the record plugin.
• During saving of movies: Crop/Extend frames to the size of the first frame.
• Fixed possible endless loop during reading of a movie if the movie does not start with image number 1.
• Bayer decoding of images with an odd height.
• Incompatible changes:
• Renamed the define DEBUG to IW_DEBUG
• Renamed and slightly changed the defines DEFAULT_WIDTH/HEIGHT to IW_PAL_WIDTH/HEIGHT.

What is new in version 0.10 RC1:

• Gtk+ 2.x support
• Extended grabber support
• Extended movie support
• CMake based build system
• And many more