Welcome to Mimas Toolkit!
INTRODUCTION
Background. Once apon a time there was a computer vision research and development tool called TINA, or There Is No Alternative. Tina provided (and still provides ) a great deal of c.v. functionality for rapid prototyping of new CV algorithms. Tina can be found at http://www.niac.man.ac.uk/Tina.
Tina has been written by a large number of developers over a long period of time. It's in C and isn't the most reliable of tools ;-). Its also not something which can be readily used to develop new user applications.
So about 2000-ish, along comes Viarga, which stands for "Viarga Is A Really Good Alternative"! Viarga was founded and maintained by Stuart Meikle. In late 2000, Viarga was renamed to Mimas and maintainence was taken over by Bala Amavasai.
Mimas started life as a C++ computer vision library which can be called by user applications. There is no implicit connection between the library and a particular GUI.
Currently functionality is somewhat complete and there is a reasonable implementation of the base classes required for computer vision tasks - image, hough transform, vector, line, simple tracking, active contours, object recognition, image capture etc.
Mimas's website is at http://www.shu.ac.uk/mmvl/mimas. This code is likely to change a lot in the future! We welcome any comments and suggestions.
LICENSE
See LICENSE file
INSTALLATION
See INSTALL file.
WRITING APPLICATIONS
If you want to write applications, get the doxygen documentation compiled or installed and then have a look at doc/html/examples.html.
SUPPORT
We highly recommend that you subscribe to the Mimas newsgroup. Details are available from:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mimas/
MISC
You can use and copy Mimas subject to the conditions of the license. However the authors of this software would encourage you to make a donation to an international charity organisation based in the UK, known as Oxfam. Please visit the Oxfam web site at:
Enjoy!
The Mimas core team:
Bala Amavasai <b.p.amavasai@shu.ac.uk>
Stuart Meikle <stu@stumeikle.org>