Wikipedia_page
this is a start of the Wikipedia entry for VIPS/Nip (I guess we stick to that name?? or split them?)
VIPS is an open source image processing software package [1] . It is particularly good with large images, works with multi-core processors, working with colour, scientific analysis and general research & development. It was developed during and is the product of several European research projects (VASARI, MARC, ACOHIR, Viseum) which were primarily about Imaging art, but which demanded a new approach to image processing.
Compared to most image processing libraries VIPS needs little RAM and runs quickly, especially on machines with more than one CPU (insert reference like wikipedia does it). This is primarily due to its architecture (insert "partials" diagram) which automatically parallelises the image workflows.
The software has two main parts: libvips is the image-processing library and nip2 is the (GUI link?) graphical user-interface. The GUI aims to be about half-way between Photoshop and Excel. It is not designed for tasks such as retouching photographs, but more useful for the many other imaging tasks that programs like Photoshop are used for. Both work on [[Linux], Unix, Windows (NT, 2k, XP, Vista, Win7) and Apple MacOS (OS 10.2 and later).
VASARI was an EU-funded research project to build a system capable of measuring long-term colour change in old master paintings. Previous systems had made a series of point measurements of areas thought likely to degrade --- of course this meant that changes in parts of the painting that hadn't been measured would be missed. VASARI aimed to fix this through imaging: we would use a camera to measure colour and simply record the whole painting.
The project had partners in Germany, France, Italy and Britain. Kirk Martinez of Birkbeck College and David Saunders of the National Gallery were responsible for building the London scanner. Kirk hired Nicos Dessipris, who had been a fellow research student in the Image Processing department of the University of Essex, and David hired John Cupitt, who had just finished a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Kent.
We wanted to image paintings up to about 1m by 1m. We wanted resolution of up to about 20 pixels per millimetre, since the smallest interesting features in a painting are about 0.1mm. We needed many colour bands (we settled on 7), since we wanted to measure reflectance spectra rather than just colour. Finally, we wanted 16 bit data. Put these requirements together and you reach an image size of about 1GB per colour channel. We could not find an image processing library which could handle the data size we needed, so we wrote our own. Machines of the time were very modest by today's standards: a Sun workstation cost £40,000, had 64MB of RAM and ran at 25 MHz, so this was quite a challenge.
Kirk and Nicos had used HIPS for their PhDs, so VIPS was based rather strongly on that. It used memory-mapped files for input (back then an exciting novelty) and wrote data a scanline at a time. At the National Gallery, John Cupitt wrote a GUI called "vf" in SunView, Sun's graphical environment. The first version just displayed an image on the workstation screen and let you pan and zoom. The next version added a simple expression language and let you type in things like "a + 12" to brighten an image. It was renamed "ip", for image processing.
VASARI ended well enough that in 1993 we had a follow-on project called MARC. This aimed to use the imaging techniques developed in VASARI to build a colorimetric camera and to use it to print an art catalogue. Nicos left and John took over the development of the VIPS library, the GUI and the camera software. Sun had just produced their first two-CPU workstation, so VIPS gained SMP support. We also wanted to reduce the time we were spending on disc IO, so at the same time we added the ability to "chain" operators together without the need for intermediate storage. ip was rewritten to use the Motif user-interface toolkit and gained fully editable history.
More projects followed (including Viseum, ACOHIR and Artiste) and VIPS and ip developed in response to their needs. We moved from Sun to Linux in the late 90s and ip moved from Motif to GTK+, becoming nip. VIPS gained support for files larger than 2GB, and for up to 64 CPUs. nip was rewritten again for GTK+-2.0 and became the nip2 we know today.
In 2005, John Cupitt moved from the National Gallery to Imperial College to work on medical imaging and VIPS and nip2 are now maintained there. Recent additions have been support for Analyze, DICOM3, FITS, Matlab and Radiance images, run-time code generation, and the start of a move to a GObject foundation. VIPS is a standard part of many Linux distributions and has an active, if rather small, community.
[1] Martinez, K. and Cupitt, J. (2005) VIPS ― a highly tuned image processing software architecture. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2, pp. 574-577, Genova