Software

Version 1.3.0 of the dysii Dynamic Systems Library is now available. The new release adds a stochastic Runge-Kutta method for stochastic differential systems, and preliminary density and kernel density (KD) tree implementations.

See the updated documentation and VERSION.txt file in the new distribution for more information.

Both a detailed tutorial and installation guide are on the way also, being partially complete. If these will be of use to you, please bug me to get a move on!

Version 1.2.0 of the dysii Dynamic Systems Library is now available. The new release adds the Auxiliary Particle Filter, a generalised framework for particle filter resampling strategies, and makes a number of optimisations and bug fixes.

Specific changes include:

• Added auxiliary particle filter.
• Added generalised resampling strategy framework.
• Fixed diagonal covariance detection for optimised Gaussian density calculations.
• Fixed several serialization bugs.
• Fixed Wiener process variance bug.

See the updated documentation and VERSION.txt file in the new distribution for more information.

I’ve added a draft version of the paper Continuous Time Particle Filtering for fMRI to the research page, to be presented as a poster at NIPS 2007. Note that this version of the paper is not available in the conference pre-proceedings. The work makes use of both the dysii Dynamic Systems Library for distributed/parallel particle filtering and smoothing, and the fmrii fMRI Modelling Library, both available on this site.

I’ve decided it would be worthwhile to develop a Photoshop plugin for Tint. While adding nicer GUI features and tools such as a desaturation brush to the standalone program would be useful, it does feel like reinventing the wheel, and an enormous wheel at that. Obviously I could quickly find myself adding a bunch of standard features already available in the most simple of image editors, let alone top of the line products like Photoshop!

The plugin should facilitate a wealth of options above and beyond the simple monochrome and colour mixing currently available. Hue changes, progressive desaturation, object recognition and image segmentation will all become a possibility. Combined with this will hopefully be some improvements to the clustering algorithm that underlies Tint, in particular focusing on improved spatial clustering.

In theory at least, the plugin should also be compatible with Paint Shop Pro and the Gimp under Windows. A specialised Gimp plugin for Unix machines is a future possibility. The idea will be to design the plugin in such a way that a standalone Tint program is still available, albeit without the further possibilities that Photoshop and other editors can provide. This will ensure that users without these commercial packages are not excluded.

I’d like to thank everyone for their comments and suggestions regarding Tint so far, and for the small number of donations that have been received to help with the hosting of the site. It truly is fantastic to have had such a response, and it has motivated me to spend some more time in developing the idea. A few rough calculations across the many software download sites where Tint is now available gives well over 50 000 downloads in the relatively short time it’s been available.

Future donations will be put towards the purchase of Photoshop and Visual Studio (required by the Photoshop SDK for developing plugins), as well as hardware upgrades to support these. Any donations, however large or small, are much appreciated to help with these substantial costs. To donate, click the “Make a donation” button on the Tint page, or visit the SourceForge page and click the “Donate” link there.

Early days yet, but I’ll keep everyone posted on how this development progresses!