The woolz image processing software was developed by the MRC Clinical Population and Cytogenetics Unit, now called the Human Genetics Unit, for fast microscope slide scanning, chromosome image analysis, pattern recognition and a wide range of image processing and analysis problems. The primary authors of the software are Dr. Denis Rutovitz and Dr Jim Piper with many contributions from others. There are a number of papers available describing the underlying structures used in the system which is based on an interval coding scheme for binary image domains and the corresponding grey-values.

The woolz image processing system has been adopted as the standard for the Mouse Atlas Databases and is used for all the reconstructions and anatomical, gene-expression and spatial domains. This is because the interval coding provides significant computing advantages in a range of image processing functions specifically set operationa (union, intersect etc.), morphological operations (erosion, dilation etc.) and other binary image processing such as distance transforms, skeletonization, segmentation and labelling. The woolz structures are also compact and in terms of grey-level data minimise memory usage without compression (which in principle can also be applied).

The woolz software is currently only provided and tested on Unix machines but the code is all ANSI standard C and will be provided for use on Win 95 and Window NT machine. The code is comprised of a number of libraries and a set of binaries which can be used in pipeline mode for Unix command line processing. The programs developed using woolz are listed separately on the software page.

The public domain version of Woolz will be available in due course, for the moment we have some documentation, the woolz header files and some manual pages. The manual pages also include the libraries Alc and Alg which are required by the woolz precedures for memory allocation and numerical algorithms.

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Woolz References:

1. Denis Rutovitz, Data structures for operations on digital images, Pictorial Pattern Recognition, Ed. Cheng G C, R S Ledley, D K Pollock and A Rosenfeld, (1968) pp106-133.
2. Piper, J. and Rutovitz, D, Data structures for image processing in a C language and Unix environment, Pattern Recognition Letters 3 (1985) pp119-129.
3. Jim Piper, Efficient implementation of skeletonisation using interval coding, Pattern Recognition Letters 3 (1985) pp.389-397
4. Lloyd, D. and Piper, J. and Rutovitz, D. and Shippey, G, Multiprocessing interval processor for automated cytogenetics, Applied Optics 26 (1987) pp3356-3366.
5. Jim Piper and Denis Rutovitz, An Investigation of Object-Oriented Programming as the Basis for an Image Processing and Analysis System, MRC HGU report (1988).
6. Liang Ji, Jim Piper and Jing-Yan Tang, Erosion and Dilation of Binary Images by Arbitrary Structuring Elements Using Interval Coding, Pattern Recognition Letters 9 (1989) pp201-209.