### vip-3.1 README file

    The VIP image processing system is Copyright (C) 1994 The University
    of Western Australia.  VIP may be used freely for research purposes.
    Those wishing to use VIP for commercial applications should contact
    the Department of Computer Science at The University of Western
    Australia.

    VIP (Visual Information Processing) is an image processing software
    library that has been developed by the Robotics and Vision
    Research Group in The Department of Computer Science at The University
    of Western Australia.  The system consists of two parts:

    1) A library of C functions for manipulating and transforming images
    that can be incorporated in your own programs.

    2) A set of stand-alone programs for performing many of the more
    commonly used operations on images.

    The VIP library of image processing functions has been designed to
    enable users to create their own image processing programs very
    quickly and simply using a toolkit of standardized library
    functions.

    The library includes functions in the following categories:

    - image input/output and memory management
    - image type and data format conversion
    - image enhancement and spatial transformations
    - mask operations
    - arithmetic operations
    - image statistics
    - frequency domain transformations
    - camera calibration and 3D data reconstruction
    - vector and matrix manipulation
    - one dimensional edge detection
    - complex arithmetic
    - miscellaneous functions

    The VIP image data structure supports a wide variety of image types
    ranging from a basic 8 bit grey level representation through to
    complex valued and colour images.  New image types can be easily added
    without `breaking' the existing software.  An additional feature of
    the VIP image data structure that distinguishes it from other image
    structures is its provision for comprehensive camera calibration data
    and lens distortion parameters.  The VIP system provides support for
    reconstruction of 3D information from images via structured light and
    stereo.

    The VIP System is designed to run under Unix on DEC Alpha, Sun Sparc
    Machines and PC's running LINUX.  We used to have a subset of VIP
    running under DOS however this is no longer maintained and the
    conditional compilation flags for DOS are probably broken.  If you are
    desperate to run under DOS you will probably have to hack around a bit
    and compile it using the huge memory model.

    See the README file in the src subdirectory for information regarding
    modification to the Makefiles for your own installation.

    A full manual for VIP can be found in vip/man/manual.ps

    If you have any problems please mail me at pk@cs.uwa.edu.au

    While we will endevour to help you as much as possible, we do not have
    the resources to support VIP on a full-time basis and our ability to
    help you may be limited.

    Good Luck,

    Peter Kovesi
    Department of Computer Science
    The University of Western Australia