Drishti

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Drishti
Image:Drishti-screenshot.gif Drishti User Interface Image:Drishti-tooth.gif Volumetric view of a tooth in Drishti showing 2D transfer function capabilities
Author	Ajay Limaye
Developer	ANU Vizlab
Latest release	0.1.8
OS	Unix/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows
Genre	Scientific visualization, Interactive visualization
License	GNU General Public License Version 2
Website	sf.anu.edu.au/Vizlab/drishti

Drishti (meaning "vision" or "insight" in Sanskrit) is a multi-platform, open-source Volume Exploration and Presentation Tool. It was written for visualizing tomography data, electron-microscopy data and so forth. It aims to ease understanding of the data set and to assist with conveying that understanding to the research community or a lay person. From the website:

"The central idea about Drishti is that the scientists should be able to use it for exploring volumetric datasets as well as use it in presentations."

It has been used by the CSIRO for a number of purposes, such as volumetric visualisation of various computer tomography datasets. ANU Physics department, along with the author of the software, have used it for, amongst other things, the analysis of immiscible flow in massive 3D systems^[1]. Further uses will be presented at APAC '07 ^[2].

[edit] Features

Image:Drishti-aneurism.png

Volumetric view of an aneurism in Drishti

Image:Drishti-streamlines.gif

Streamlines in Drishti

Drishti provides a number of features that would otherwise require several proprietary volume visualisation programs or that are simply not available together in other software:

volume rendering: drawing a scalar function defined over a volumetric region of space with some translucent appearance so that the interior of the dataset can be observed.
2D Transfer functions (or Lookup tables): In addition to, or instead of thresholding, Drishti allows the user to apply transfer functions across "density" or "value" as well as gradient.
clipping: removing some spatial region from a dataset.
Streamlines
Masking
Brick Animations
Realtime animation and movie export with:
- camera choreography (camera position, pan, rotation, zoom, etc.)
- transfer-function choreography
- time series choreography
- sub-volume choreography
Importing DICOM image stack in addition to the current raw and processed (netCDF) volume file formats.
Tensor visualization using superellipsoids
Network (Graph) visualization
Remap facility for remapping 16/32 bit volumes to 8 bit volumes
Cropping and scaling facility for image stacks
Cropping and scaling facility for RAW volumes
Saving movies from the program