KAPPA -- Kernel applications

[SUN/95]

The Kernel Application Package runs under ADAM, using the NDF data format, and provides general-purpose applications. It is the backbone of the software reorganization around the ADAM environment, and its applications integrate with other packages such as PHOTOM, PISA, and FIGARO. It is usable as a single large program from the ADAM command language ICL, or as individual applications from DCL.

It handles bad pixels, and processes quality and variance information within NDF data files. Although oriented towards image processing, many applications will work on NDFs of arbitrary dimension. Its graphics are device independent. Currently, KAPPA has about 140 commands and provides the following facilities for data processing:

• Generation of NDFs and ASCII tables by up-to-date FITS readers.
• Generation of test data, and NDF creation from ASCII files.
• Setting NDF components.
• Arithmetic, including a powerful application that handles expressions.
• Editing pixels and regions, including polygons and circles, and re-flagging bad pixels by value or by median filtering.
• Configuration changing: flip, rotate, shift, subset, dimensionality.
• Image mosaicking; normalization of NDF pairs.
• Compression and expansion of images.
• Filtering: box, Gaussian, and median smoothing; very efficient Fourier transform, maximum-entropy deconvolution.
• Surface fitting.
• Statistics, including ordered statistics, histogram, pixel-by-pixel statistics over a sequence of images.
• Inspection of image values.
• Centroiding of features, particularly stars; stellar PSF fitting.
• Detail enhancement via histogram equalization, Laplacian convolution, edge enhancement via a shadow effect, thresholding.

There are also many applications for data visualization:

• Use of the graphics database, AGI, to pass information about pictures between applications. Facilities for the creation, labelling and selection of pictures, and obtaining world and data co-ordinate information from them.
• Image and greyscale plots with a selection of scaling modes and many options such as axes.
• Creation, selection, saving and manipulation of colour tables and palettes (for axes, annotation, coloured markers and borders).
• Snapshot of an image display to hardcopy.
• Blinking and visibility of image-display planes.
• Line graphics: contouring, including overlay; columnar and hidden-line plots of images; histogram; line plots of 1-d arrays, and multiple-line plots of images; slices through an image. There is some control of the appearance of plots.

To run KAPPA:

See Chapter for a demonstration of KAPPA.