Welcome to the i2k Retina™ image alignment and montaging software tool, the most sophisticated tool of its kind to be found anywhere. This page provides an overview of the user interface, one of three ways to interact with i2k Retina™. The second and third methods are a command-line executable and a C-level programming interface.
Trial Mode
After installation, the software starts in trial mode, which allows users to test all of the i2k Retina™ functions, but the images it produces have subtle watermarks. Trial mode lasts for up to 14 days and 75 runs of the core align / montage functionality. At any time, the user can purchase an activation code and use it to activate the full functionality of the software, eliminating the watermarks.
Purchase and Activation
In order to purchase i2k Retina™ users must purchase a 16-bit activation code from the website. Here are the steps you need to take:
1. Click on Order Now from the i2k Retina™ dialog or go directly to the i2Align™ website.
2. Place an Order.
3. You will receive the 16-bit code via email. Note that the email with the code may take up to 15 minutes after your purchase to arrive in your Inbox.
4. You may activate i2k Retina™ by typing in the 16-digit activation code you received. You can do this when you start or restart the software from the i2k Retina™ Trial dialog, or by clicking Trial -> Standard Activation from the main menu.
If have trouble activating, and make several unsuccessful attempts, you may run our manual activation process instead by clicking Trial -> Manual Activation or by switching to manual activation from the Activation dialog. This process should only be required for customers with atypical internet connections.
The Two Tools of i2k Retina™
Fundamentally, i2k Retina™ has two tools, each taking N images as input and producing one or more image files as output. These output images are shown to the user in a preview window. Here are the two tools:
1. The montage tool builds a montage of the input images, blending them to create a single, composite image, with motion artifacts removed, seams eliminated, and illumination differences corrected.
2. The align tool registers the input images, mapping them into a common coordinate frame so that each pixel of each image correspondences to the same physical point. This allows users to combine images from different modalities, to visualize blood flow in angiograms, and to see how the same scene looks at different times on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
After the montage or the align tool completes, the resulting images are saved to output files, which then may be previewed in several ways. For montages, the preview window allows the user to zoom in and scroll around the montage. For aligned images, the preview plays the images in a sequence loop, with controls on the speed of playback, and controls providing the ability to pause and step forward and backward through the images.
Image Modalities
While primarily a tool for retinal fundus images, i2k Retina™ works with a wide variety of image types. The software itself requires the user to choose between Retina, Photographic images and Other Modalities. The "Other Modalities" label is a catch-all, which means simply that the same processing is applied to each set of images that is labeled this way.
i2k Retina™ handles most common input image formats, including JPEG, PNG, PNM, BPM and TIF, handling 16-bit versions of PNG and TIF. This list will be extended in the future, in part based on customer demand.
The i2k Retina™ User Interface
Everything about the user interface is built around input to, control of, and output from the Align and Montage tools. Across the across the top of the display (below the menus)
from left to right, the user may
- Control the image type
- Add Images to the thumbnail area. These are added to the images that have already been placed in the area, allowing images from different folders to be considered at the same time.
- See the path to the folder that images were most recently added from.
- Remove all images from the thumbnail display using the Clear All button.
Turning next to the buttons across the bottom of the i2k Retina™ display, the center buttons control the selection of the thumbnails and the size of the thumbnails.
Of course, clicking on the thumbnails themselves is the primary means of selecting a thumbnail. (Note that right-clicking on a thumbnail gives some detail on the image.) Once two or more thumbnails are selected, the user can click on the Generate Montage button or the Align Images button to launch the main montaging and alignment computations, which are applied to the selected thumbnails.
Options and Preferences
The left side of the central display shows tabs for selecting a number of options for aligning and for montaging images.
These options change with the choice of image type, giving six different combinations. Fortunately, the choices fall into just a few categories, with layout and crop being the primary categories: the layout options control the arrangement of the images relative to each other, while the crop options control the cropping of the final montage and the final aligned images. These six combinations are explained by following the links below. There is a seventh link that explains a set of overall system preferences available through the File menu (on the Mac the i2kAlign™ or i2kAlignRetinaMenu).
After Generate Montage or Align Image Begins
Once the thumbnails have been selected and the either Generate Montage or Align Images has been clicked, the main processing of i2k Retina™ begins. At this point, a progress bar will appear. This shows the approximate percentage of work i2k Retina™ has completed and presents the user with the option to cancel the computation. Once i2k Retina™ is finished, a preview of the results, which i2k Retina™ has already saved, will be presented to the user.
Previewing Montages
The preview of the montage results shows the montage scaled to fit the screen. If the montage is larger than the screen, the user will be able to scale it up to see it at higher resolution. The user can also increase the size of the display. Eventually, scrollbars will appear to allow movement around the montage. Grabbing the montage with the mouse, also allows the user to move around the montage. The mouse track wheel gives the user additional control over zooming.
Previewing Aligned Images
The preview of the aligned images shows each aligned image, one at a time. (The folder where the aligned images are saved and links to the aligned images appear at the top of the display.) Controls on the lower left of the display allow the user to zoom in on the aligned images. The second of controls allows the user to determine the time interval between the display of each successive image. Finally, four buttons in the center allow the user to step forward and backward through the images, pause the animation, and restart it.
