A Graphical-User Interface for Editing Segmentation Images

Abstract

I present a graphical-user interface for performing several image operations on segmentation maps. The package is written entirely in IDL, and is provided as source code (for those who may want to develop, link to existing packages, or reappropriate the code base) and eventually as a stand-alone, run-time executable upon request (for those without an IDL license). The software facilitates a number of operations, which are generally tedious without a graphical interface, such as deleting, merging, ungrouping, and drawing regions; erasing and painting individual pixels; and compression, dilation, and erosion of a segmentation image. The segmentation image is displayed with random RGB triplets to ensure adjacent regions are readily discernible, whereas the direct image is shown as an inverted greyscale with controls for brightness range, bias, and contrast with several scaling functions (as similar to ds9). The opacity between the segmentation and direct image is tunable, which gives full control to the image display.