VisiQuest

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Drosophila Research

"With VisiQuest, we can test, verify, reconfigure, and retest our solutions in the lab — in hours instead of days or weeks."

John Reinitz, Lead Scientist, SUNY
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How others use VisiQuest for discovery

Adaptive Computing System

Adaptive Computing System (ACS) allows the user to compile an image processing visual program into Single Assignment C, or SA-C.

As part of the DARPA ACS program, VisiQuest was used by a large University to provide their image processing expert with minimal hardware knowledge to do adaptive computing system application development using VisiQuest’s visual programming environment.

Automatic Target Recognition

Automatic Target Recognition presents an image understanding/pattern recognition problem in which the purpose is to identify and extract information about a specific object in a scene.

The VisiQuest software development system as well as its functionality services has been utilized in The Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) program is the first ATR development program promoting the notion of ATR commodotization, or the building of reusable component-ware for ATR research. The defense automatic target recognition community has begun to standardize VisiQuest as a software integration environment for ATR. The motivation for doing this is a combination of a recognized need to reuse ATR algorithms between systems and to provide eased integration of legacy systems with new ATRs.

Climate Diagnostics

VisiQuest was adopted by climate analysis center to help perform climate diagnostic studies on a variety of datasets to provide an understanding of the nature and causes of climate variability on time scales varying between months and centuries.

VisiQuest's software development environment was also adopted for the ease of prototyping, computer aided software engineering, data visualization, numerical analysis, image processing, geometry visualization and file format conversion.

Visual programs created with VisiQuest may be repeatedly used to run the same analysis techniques on slightly different sets of data; results may then be compared. The Satellite Climate Research Group has developed several VisiQuest toolboxes for analyzing and visualizing satellite data sets.

Long Term Ecological Research

Long term ecological research (LTER) concerns itself with the study of responses of ecosystems to environmental changes.

VisiQuest has recently been used for a research study by a well-known LTER organization The study consisted of a research area of approximately 3600 square kilometers and included four dedicated research areas, at which ecological parameters over gradients ranging from small to large scale are measured. Some of the research that has been conducted includes analysis of lightning strike data and in organization and concentration of plant species. In the former, collected data is analyzed for frequency of occurrence and concentration of strikes areas with the study site. In the latter, VisiQuest was used for automatic near ground level (NGL) validation and ground truthing of vegetation.

Multi-Sensor Exploitation Testbed

The Multi-Sensor Exploitation Testbed (MSET) is a DARPA program that supports multi-sensor imaging exploitation efforts to apply automated, advanced spectral exploitation technologies to an operational sensor.

MSET develops the registration, fusion, and HCI tools required to integrate spectral capabilities into future multi-sensor exploitation ground stations, and creates the spectral exploitation tools to support future multispectral and hyperspectral programs. Algorithms for themulti-spectral image exploitation include image registration, screening and cuing, geolocation, terrain delimitation, object-level change detection, spatial grouping, discrimination thresholding, spectral analysis, force structure analysis, and interactive spectral recognition. The MSET algorithms, some of which are legacy codes, have been developed by a number of different government contractors using a variety of software development methods and standards.

VisiQuest is used as the integration environment in which these diverse algorithms are brought together into a single cohesive environment using a data flow network to form the testbed. In addition, a number of the MSET developers have now standardized on VisiQuest as their software development system.

Space Base Radar

A Space Base Radar (SBR) system can provide high military utility by providing rapid response, all-weather wide area surveillance of military targets of interest.

VisiQuest’s Visual programming environment, software configuration control, and inherent abstraction and encapsulation features, as well as data reduction, data analysis, and visualization tools have be utilized in order to reduce the overall development effort for

In order to help analysts better understand how to design and utilize and SBR, the performance of the SBR must be modeled to understand the strengths and weaknesses of a spaced based architecture. The idea of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Spacecraft Simulation Toolkit (SST) program is to provide an advanced, flexible development environment for simulating complex spacecraft and their components. The SST allows analysts to focus on the military utility of an SBR system by providing a simulation that can vary the target types, speeds, and headings within a common range of inherent clutter backgrounds, highlighting the differences between airborne platforms and space based platforms. The SST uses VisiQuest as its integration environment.

The visual programming environment, software configuration control, and inherent abstraction and encapsulation features, as well as data reduction, data analysis, and visualization tools have be utilized in order to reduce the overall development effort for SST.

Ultrasound Imaging Processing

VisiQuest has been deployed at one of the countries top pediatric hospitals to aid in the development of an ultrasound image processing application.

This application quantitatively measures the volume of the brain ventricles in hydrocephalic preterm infants. Used in a clinical setting, this application would accept a radial series of input scans from the video output of a diagnostic ultrasound machine. An automatic segmentation procedure that had been developed in Cantata using the VisiQuest image processing operators was used inside the application to automatically detect the ventricular regions on each ultrasound image. These identified regions would then be integrated into an overall volume and then presented to the physician for analysis. The application itself was developed using the VisiQuest software development environment; data services was used to interpret the ultrasound image data, while GUI & Visualization services provided the visual components for building the application.