Drishti

Drishti

Drishti User Interface Volumetric view of a tooth in Drishti showing 2D transfer function capabilities
Original author(s)	Ajay Limaye
Developer(s)	ANU Vizlab
Stable release	0.1.8
Operating system	Unix/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows
Type	Scientific visualization, Interactive visualization
License	GNU General Public License Version 2
Website	http://anusf.anu.edu.au/Vizlab/drishti/

For 1990 Hindi film by Govind Nihalani, see Drishti (film).

Drishti (meaning "vision" or "insight" in Sanskrit) is a multi-platform, open-source Volume Exploration and Presentation Tool. It was written for visualizing tomography data, electron-microscopy data and so forth. It aims to ease understanding of the data set and to assist with conveying that understanding to the research community or a lay person. From the website:

"The central idea about Drishti is that the scientists should be able to use it for exploring volumetric datasets as well as use it in presentations."

It has been used by the CSIRO for a number of purposes, such as volumetric visualisation of various computer tomography datasets. The Australian National University (ANU) Physics department, along with the author of the software, have used it for, amongst other things, the analysis of immiscible flow in massive 3D systems^[1]. Further uses will be presented at APAC '07 ^[2].

Features

Volumetric view of an aneurism in Drishti

Streamlines in Drishti

Drishti provides a number of features that would otherwise require several proprietary volume visualisation programs or that are simply not available together in other software:

• volume rendering: drawing a scalar function defined over a volumetric region of space with some translucent appearance so that the interior of the dataset can be observed.
• 2D Transfer functions (or Lookup tables): In addition to, or instead of thresholding, Drishti allows the user to apply transfer functions across "density" or "value" as well as gradient.
• clipping: removing some spatial region from a dataset.
• Streamlines
• Masking
• Brick Animations
• Realtime animation and movie export with:
  • camera choreography (camera position, pan, rotation, zoom, etc.)
  • transfer-function choreography
  • time series choreography
  • sub-volume choreography
• Importing DICOM image stack in addition to the current raw and processed (netCDF) volume file formats.
• Tensor visualization using superellipsoids
• Network (Graph) visualization
• Remap facility for remapping 16/32 bit volumes to 8 bit volumes
• Cropping and scaling facility for image stacks
• Cropping and scaling facility for RAW volumes
• Saving movies from the program

References

1. ^ Annual Report on 2005 Project
2. ^ APAC07 conference & exhibition

External links

• Drishti Website
• Drishti Tutorial Videos