Plug im!

Open access software for signal and image processing
(http://www.plugim.fr/)

IFPEN provides its internal signal and image processing platform for those who want the most advanced features combined with a simple and understandable user interface.
The developed plug-ins, directly linked to publications, as well as other digital operators, are detailed in the next subpages. All of them are available under plug im!, as well as many other plug-ins for signals, images and/or volumes processing.

Note for readers

In these pages, some plug-ins available under plug im! are detailed; the plug-in is briefly defined with a help for its use. Plug-ins can be modified/updated for various reasons. The latest modifications will be indicated in News.

If you have any questions, remarks or suggestions, please reach out (Contact).

About Plug im! use

'Open' button:
It allows you to open the main file, i.e., a binary or grayscale image, according to the application. In the plug-ins description, on the other subpages, if there is only one input, this button is made for opening it, if there are multiple inputs, this button is dedicated to the opening of the main image.

'...' button:
It is dedicated to the opening of a second file, i.e., a binary or grayscale image or a text file, when the selected plug-in allows (optional) or requests an additional file.

'Save' button:
It allows to save the current image, i.e., the image displayed in Plug im!. This is useful to save some results of operators, in particular 2D or 3D maps.

'Export' button:
It allows to save a text file including the results of the chosen operator.

Some definitions

Binary microstructure:
Biphasic microstructure: A microstructure, either a 2D or 3D  binary image, is defined as follows: the white part (255) represents the microstructure to analyze, the black part (0) represents the phase without interest.
Triphasic microstructure: 2D or 3D image with three specific intensities: 0 for the surrounding void, meaningless, 255 for the solid phase, and the rest is considered as the porous phase. A mask is defined, distinguishing the surrounding void (0) from the material sample of interest (all other intensities). The triphasic image can be the output of the plug-in "Extraction of porosity". This option is originally added to consider images of real materials, as the ones obtained using electron tomography.
In practice: The data type (top left of the Plug im! window) has to be 'unsigned char', 'integer', 'float' or 'double'. 'RGB' images are not allowed. A maximal volume is also imposed, equal to 1,000,000,000 voxels (arbitrary value which can be modified if necessary).

Skeleton:
 This is an optional step. The skeleton of the microstructure can be considered instead of the microstructure. We recommand the computation of a homotopic skeleton, which is, theoretically, the smallest subset of keeping the microstructure topology.
Specificities: If the skeleton is considered, it has to be opened as the main input ('Open' button). If necessary, the microstructure has to be loaded using the '...' button, for instance for the ...-by-iterative-erosions and A-protocol plug-ins. The skeleton allows a consistent reduction in computation time.
For ...-by-iterative-erosions plug-ins: If the skeleton is considered ('Use skeleton'), the computation time of the morphological erosions is reduced too, as the valued skeleton is considered; the distance map value is assigned to each skeleton point.