PIPP

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.

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

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.

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