Addendum - Image Post Processing

Planetary Imaging PreProcessor PIPP

updated: 2023-02-27


  • Best suited to pre-process planetary or lunar videos.
  • PIPP is a Windows application designed for pre-processing planetary images before stacking them with image stacking software such as Registax.  
  • PIPP's main purpose is to crop each image frame and select only the best quality frames to reduce the memory and processing requirements of the stacking software.  
  • For example, this would allow the best 1500 frames from a 7200 frame AVI (2 minute AVI at 60 fps) to be cropped ready for stacking by Registax.  

Input:

    • Many typical video file formats, e.g. SER, AVI, MOV,... or a sequence of image files like TIFF, BMP, FITS, JPEG, RAW

Output:

    • either sequence of image file in TIPP, BMP, FITS ro PNG format - or single video file in AVI, SER or animated GIF format


PIPP's functions:

    • Calibrate frames with dark, flat and dark flat calibration frames.
    • Debayer raw frames from color cameras to produce color frames.
    • Check each frame contains a planet that is completely on the image and discard any frames that do not.
    • Check for and discard overexposed frames.
    • Center the planet in the frames.
    • Offset the centered planet.
    • Crop each frame around the centered planet.
    • Apply a fixed gain to each frame.
    • Apply a fixed gamma correct to each frame.
    • Apply a median noise filter to each frame.
    • Stretch histogram for each frame (equalizing R, G and B channels for color images).
    • Estimate the quality of each frame and reorder the processed frames in order of quality.
    • Keep only the number of best quality frames specified by the user.
    • Split color frames into R, G and B frames.

Links:


Screenshots

One of 2718 input frames from an AVI video file with object detection and adjustment mark


Progress screen during the processing of a lunar AVI video stream into a PNG file

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