SimpleITK/Design And Proposals/SIP 002

SIP 002 - Data Bridge for SimpleITK

Introduction

SimpleITK is an emerging useful tool for image analysis, segmentation and registration by providing a simplified interface to ITK in variety of programming language. However, many users implement and develop their image processing methods with the N-dimensional array object and functions of the Numpy package in parallel.

To support data transparency between the functions of SimpleITK and NumPy, SimpleITK provides functional integration with NumPy-based script and a method of data-conversion between SimpleITK’s image data and the N-dimensional array object of NumPy. But, there is a significant performance bottleneck in the data-conversion which is based on the operation of data copy. The performance bottleneck can be increased with the size of handling image data and the number of data-conversion.

We wish to remove the performance bottleneck by allowing SimpleITK’s image and the arrays of NumPy to share pointers to the same memory symmetrically with copy-on-write semantics. In addition, we wish these enhancements will deliver the performance improvements to many existing SimpleITK’s scripts through a simple library update.

Comments

Brad Lowekamp: Comments can be made here

Section 1

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Sub Section A

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