Tomviz 1.6 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of Tomviz 1.6 (GitHub release page). This release features a number of improvements to application startup time, and a splash screen to show that the application is starting up on the occasions where it doesn’t start as quickly as we would like. The reconstruction operators were also improved to use less memory, default to 32 bit floating point output, and to execute more efficiently. New operators support improved support wrangling from picking a single component when input data has multiple channels (e.g. RGB) to casting/rescaling data to reduce memory requirements (8 and 16 bit unsigned integers for example). The bottom right two render views shows a side-by-side comparison of 16 bit volume rescaled into an 8 bit representation.

We have made a number of improvements to the “live” pipeline, where updated reconstructions can be viewed as an iterative reconstruction proceeds, or data can be viewed as projections are acquired. The EMD format saw a number of improvements for saving/loading metadata including lengths/angles. An issue with array ordering was discovered, meaning old EMD files will look corrupt, but all future files will be saved with the appropriate array ordering. We added a transpose data operator that will reorder these old files to enable recovery of data (or you can use an older version of Tomviz to read the file). NumPy files were also improved, and round tripping to/from Python visualizations were tested with both EMD and NumPy. Files, directories and state files can all be opened from the command line now too.

We would like to extend a huge thank you to our community members for offering feedback that has led to a number of usability improvements in this release. We use GitHub to report issues, and will be at Microscopy and Microanalysis this summer showing the latest developments in Tomviz.

The Tomviz project is developed as part of a collaboration between Kitware and the University of Michigan under DOE Office of Science contract DE-SC0011385. This is a community project, and we are very pleased to take input and contributions from all in the community.