• Source: Bitplane

Bitplane is a provider of software for 3D and 4D image analysis for the life sciences. Founded in December 1992, Bitplane operates out of three offices in Zürich, Switzerland, Belfast, United Kingdom, and South Windsor, Connecticut, United States.




Company history


As confocal microscopes were first becoming commercially available, the founders of Bitplane, Marius Messerli, Karl-Hermann Fuchs, and Jürgen Holm, realised that there was no suitable way to visualize and analyze the images provided by this more modern equipment. While pursuing their research at the Institute for cell Biology at the ETH in Zurich the first productive version of Bitplane's core product, Imaris, was developed. A small community of users developed among the scientific collaborators of the founders and the company Bitplane was created.
The name Imaris derives from three words: "image" analysis, the primary function of the software, "Marius" the name of the innovator and Bitplane co-founder, and finally, the "Personal Iris", the name of the hardware that initially enabled interactive 3D imaging.
When Imaris was introduced to the market in 1993 it ran only on Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations as at the time only these were capable to perform 3D volume rendering at a speed worthy of being deemed "interactive". With the appearance of OpenGL capable graphics boards in personal computers the company decided to port its software to Windows and Macintosh and released a first version for the personal computer in 2001.
By the end of 1994, the software had sold in 30 labs in central Europe. In 1998, the product was introduced to the US market.
From 1994 to 1997, in co-operation with the Maurice E. Muller foundation in Bern, Switzerland, Bitplane launched a second line of software products for the documentation and management of medical information for orthopedic surgeons. In 1997, this part of Bitplane's activity was made independent. Headed by Dr. Holm, this software line operates under the name of Qualidoc AG, Switzerland, and is a vendor of hospital information management systems.
Bitplane was acquired by Andor Technology in December 2009.




Market history


Bitplane raised venture capital in 2000 to accelerate its growth. After an investment with Endeavour ([1]), Bitplane started to grow its presence in North America and built a new technology foundation for the software.
After having weathered a slowing in demand caused by the burst of the internet bubble in 2001, Bitplane steadily grew in sales, market share, and profitability.
The development of Imaris is tightly linked to the development of the confocal microscope. The first publication of a confocal microscope appeared in 1957 when Marvin Minsky patented his microscope (Minsky 1957). The instrument did not find much attention in the scientific community at the time due to the lack of light collection efficiency. It was only at the end of the 1970s, with the generation of scanning confocal microscopes, that the technique became useful for biological studies (Brakenhoff, 1979 and Choudhury 1977).
In order to explore the 3D capabilities of the confocal microscope, the instrument still had to be combined with high-end graphics computers. The first combination of a confocal microscope with specialized computer hardware that enabled digital image processing was presented by Van der Voort et al. (1985). In the late 1980s, Biorad introduced the first commercial laser scanning confocal microscope to the market, followed by Carl Zeiss and Leica soon after. All of these instruments delivered quality 3D images, however, there was no software to properly visualize and analyze the content. The development of Imaris started in 1989, to fulfill the needs of biologists to take full advantage of these high-quality images.




Products






= Imaris

=
Imaris is Bitplane's core product which provides functionality for the visualization, segmentation and interpretation of 3D and 4D microscopy datasets. Imaris allows visualization of original and derived data objects in a real time interactive manner so one can quickly make visual assessments of one's experiments in 3D and 4D to discover relationships that are otherwise hidden. With a large variety of segmentation options, Imaris provides the user with tools to segment large datasets to identify, separate, and visualize individual objects.




References






External links


www.bitplane.com
www.andor.com
www.mih.unibas.ch
www.endeavourvision.com
www.vetvir.uzh.ch/frame.html
• Source: Bit plane

A bit plane of a digital discrete signal (such as image or sound) is a set of bits corresponding to a given bit position in each of the binary numbers representing the signal.
For example, for 16-bit data representation there are 16 bit planes: the first bit plane contains the set of the most significant bit, and the 16th contains the least significant bit.
It is possible to see that the first bit plane gives the roughest but the most critical approximation of values of a medium, and the higher the number of the bit plane, the less is its contribution to the final stage. Thus, adding a bit plane gives a better approximation.
If a bit on the nth bit plane on an m-bit dataset is set to 1, it contributes a value of 2m−n, otherwise it contributes nothing. Therefore, bit planes can contribute half of the value of the previous bit plane. For example, in the 8-bit value 10110101 (181 in decimal) the bit planes work as follows:

Bit plane is sometimes used as synonymous to Bitmap; however, technically the former refers to the location of the data in memory and the latter to the data itself.
One aspect of using bit-planes is determining whether a bit-plane is random noise or contains significant information.
One method for calculating this is to compare each pixel (X, Y) to three adjacent pixels (X − 1, Y), (X, Y − 1) and (X − 1, Y − 1). If the pixel is the same as at least two of the three adjacent pixels, it is not noise. A noisy bit-plane will have 49% to 51% pixels that are noise.




Applications






= Media file formats

=
As an example, in PCM sound encoding the first bit in the sample denotes the sign of the function, or in other words defines the half of the whole amplitude values range, and the last bit defines the precise value. Replacement of more significant bits result in more distortion than replacement of less significant bits. In lossy media compression that uses bit-planes it gives more freedom to encode less significant bit-planes and it is more critical to preserve the more significant ones.
As illustrated in the image above, the early bitplanes, particularly the first, may have constant runs of bits, and thus can be efficiently encoded by run-length encoding. This is done (in the transform domain) in the Progressive Graphics File image format, for instance.




= Bitmap displays

=
Some computers displayed graphics in bit-plane format, most notably PC with EGA graphics card, the Amiga and Atari ST, contrasting with the more common packed format. This allowed certain classes of image manipulation to be performed using bitwise operations (especially by a blitter chip), and parallax scrolling effects.




= Video motion estimation

=
Some motion estimation algorithms can be performed using bit planes (e.g. after the application of a filter to turn salient edge features into binary values). This can sometimes provide a good enough approximation for correlation operations with minimal computational cost. This relies on an observation that the spatial information is more significant than the actual values. Convolutions may be reduced to bit shift and popcount operations, or performed in dedicated hardware.




= Neural networks

=
Bitplane formats may be used for passing images to Spiking neural networks, or low precision approximations to neural networks/convolutional neural networks.




Programs


Many image processing packages can split an image into bit-planes. Open source tools such as Pamarith from Netpbm and Convert from ImageMagick can be used to generate bit-planes.




See also


Color depth
Planar
Binary image




References

Kata Kunci Pencarian:

• Super Nintendo Entertainment System
• Bitplane
• ILBM
• Amiga Advanced Graphics Architecture
• Commodore 65
• Planar (computer graphics)
• Flood fill
• Super Nintendo Entertainment System
• Amiga Original Chip Set
• Bit plane
• Sixel