SlicerAstro: a 3-D interactive visual analytics tool for HI data
Abstract
SKA precursors are capable of detecting hundreds of galaxies in HI in a single 12 hours pointing. In deeper surveys one will probe more easily faint HI structures, typically located in the vicinity of galaxies, such as tails, filaments, and extraplanar gas. The importance of interactive visualization has proven to be fundamental for the exploration of such data as it helps users to receive immediate feedback when manipulating the data. We have developed SlicerAstro, a 3-D interactive viewer with new analysis capabilities, based on traditional 2-D input/output hardware. These capabilities enhance the data inspection, allowing faster analysis of complex sources than with traditional tools. SlicerAstro is an open-source extension of 3DSlicer, a multi-platform open source software package for visualization and medical image processing. We demonstrate the capabilities of the current stable binary release of SlicerAstro, which offers the following features: i) handling of FITS files and astronomical coordinate systems; ii) coupled 2-D/3-D visualization; iii) interactive filtering; iv) interactive 3-D masking; v) and interactive 3-D modeling. In addition, SlicerAstro has been designed with a strong, stable and modular C++ core, and its classes are also accessible via Python scripting, allowing great flexibility for user-customized visualization and analysis tasks.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1703.06651,
title = {SlicerAstro: a 3-D interactive visual analytics tool for HI data},
author = {D. Punzo and J. M. van der Hulst and J. B. T. M. Roerdink and J. C. Fillion-Robin and L. Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.06651},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
18 pages, 11 figures, Accepted by Astronomy and Computing. SlicerAstro link: https://github.com/Punzo/SlicerAstro/wiki#get-slicerastro