Flicker Program Status

The new version of Flicker which now runs as a stand-alone Java application is beta-level code. The following are known bugs, suggested features, functions that are being debugged or being developed, and resolved bugs.

Revision history
Known bugs
Suggested Features/FAQ
Resolved bugs

Known Bugs

03-20-2004: There is no Flicker.lax file for the MacOS-X, Linux and Solaris systems. So the (Edit | Resize Flicker memory limits) command does not work on these systems at this time - it does on Windows.

02-23-2004: The NTSC (R,G,B) image to grayscale option needs to be debugged. This will allow users to do quantification on the color image after it has been converted to grayscale. Otherwise, it uses the blue channel which of course biases the results.

02-23-2004: Problem with Flicker not finding an image when you restart it with a previously saved .flk file if you have moved the image files to a different directory. This is because the .flk file saves the path and by moving the files, you have changed the path. Flicker has no way of knowing that you changed the path. You can either specify the files again, or edit the .flk file.

02-23-2004: Problem where the Help menu entries that are supposed to pop up a Web browser - don't. This is because the browser is not configured correctly with the users operating system. The solution is to just go to the Flicker Web site through a separately launched browser. All of the links in Help are available through the Web site.

12-17-2003: Allow gang-control of brightness/contrast range for both left and right images. This is useful if they were taken under the same conditions and have about the same initial contrast/brightness [Suggested by S. Lockett].

12-17-2003: Need to zoom the positions of landmarks, and measured spots and circular mask in the new image scroller.

11-10-2003: the (Transform | Poly Warp) menu command is not available. It needs to be debugged.

11-09-2003: The (Transform | Pseudo3D) command does not remap the landmarks correctly after doing the pseudo 3D transform.

Suggested Features / FAQ

03-16-2004: Note on screen size. Flicker will work with a 1024x768 size screen. However, we find it MUCH easier to use with a larger screen (e.g. 1280x1024 works nicely). Because we are using AWT, it is difficult to optimize wasted whitespace in the main window. Until this is resolved, we suggest trying to run Flicker on a computer with higher resolution.

03-16-2004: Gang scrolling only works if you use the Control-click method for scrolling the images. It does not currently work if you use the scrollbars. Normally, you would align the two images to the same spot using flickering, then enable gang scrolling. Then use the Control-click to scroll both images together.

12-17-2003: Extend the brightness/contrast range [Suggested by S. Lockett].

12-17-2003: Add option so that when do a (File | Open user images) command that presents images from a user directory, you can either generate pairs of serially comparable images (e.g., an ordered set of images from an optical or E.M. serial sectioning) or all pairs of images (the current default) [Suggested by S. Lockett].

12-17-2003: Sometimes it does not restore the spot list that you have saved with a (File | SaveAs state file) and restored with a (File | Open state file) command.

12-10-2003: The way we are implementing the image scroller does not allow you to center spots you select (Control-Press) with the mouse that are close to the edge of the image. the image. Currently these spots will not be centered since there is no image beyond the edge. We will be resolving this by adding a white space guard region around the edge of the image.

12-09-2003: (GT) Images in all three canvases are getting cropped off at the bottom and right sides. When one compares the original image with the one displayed in Flicker (scroll to the bottom right) part of the image is missing. Changing the pagestep parameter in ImageScroller.java to 1 from 15 seems to help but there is still 5 pixels width missing. (JC) Related to this is that if you shrink the canvas size, it seems to readly cut off what is scrollable.

10-31-2003: The (File | Open image file) and (File | Open image URL) menu commands are not available for color TIFF images at this time. It does work with grayscale TIFF images. Note that images with more than 8-bits of grayscale are scaled down to 8-bits losing the least significant bits.

11-10-2003: Fix blackIsZeroFlag EVERYWHERE... need to have XxxxLoaders set it.

11-10-2003: If do full quantification of 16-bit TIFF images, rethink keeping or re-reading 16-bit TIFF image data as (char iPix[]) if we are going to do quantification on that type of image without losing grayscale resolution.

11-10-2003: Check and debug ImageXform.remapLMS() for Pseudo3D and PolyWarp transforms.

11-10-2003: Check data structures, implementation, and debug the boundary drawing code for (Quantify | Measure by boundary) methods.

11-10-2003: Check and debug measurements made on the Zoom image for magnifications different than 1X. It currently performs the measurements as if it were 1X.

11-10-2003: Add vertical and horizontal 1D gaussian-like line filters for use with other types of data. E.g, here is an example of a filter to look for horizontal lines:

       0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
       1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 
       2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 
       1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
       0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

11-10-2003: Get some better edge enhancement filters.

11-10-2003: Add interactive rubber-band ROI window definition GUI.