ImageJ is a

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

-based

image processing An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be displayed through other media, including a pr ...

program developed at the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...

and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation (LOCI, University of Wisconsin). Its first version, ImageJ 1.x, is developed in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

, while ImageJ2 and the related projects SciJava, ImgLib2, and SCIFIO are licensed with a permissive BSD-2 license. ImageJ was designed with an

open architecture Open architecture is a type of computer architecture or software architecture intended to make adding, upgrading, and swapping components with other computers easy. For example, the IBM PC, Amiga 2000 and Apple IIe have an open architecture supp ...

that provides

extensibility Extensibility is a software engineering and systems design principle that provides for future growth. Extensibility is a measure of the ability to extend a system and the level of effort required to implement the extension. Extensions can be t ...

via Java plugins and recordable macros. Custom acquisition, analysis and processing plugins can be developed using ImageJ's built-in editor and a Java compiler. User-written plugins make it possible to solve many image processing and analysis problems, from three-dimensional live-cell imaging to

radiological In physics, radiation is the emission or transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles through space or a material medium. This includes: * ''electromagnetic radiation'' consisting of photons, such as radio waves, microwaves, infr ...

image processing, multiple imaging system data comparisons to automated

hematology Hematology (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, spelled haematology in British English) is the branch of medicine concerned with the study of the cause, prognosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases related to bloo ...

systems. ImageJ's plugin architecture and built-in development environment has made it a popular platform for teaching image processing. ImageJ can be run as an online

applet In computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a dedicated widget engine or a larger program, often as a plug-in. The term is frequently used to refer to a Java applet, a program ...

, a downloadable application, or on any computer with a Java 5 or later

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

. Downloadable distributions are available for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, and the Sharp Zaurus PDA. The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

for ImageJ is freely available. The project developer, Wayne Rasband, retired from the Research Services Branch of the NIH's

National Institute of Mental Health The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primar ...

in 2010, but continues to develop the software.

Features

ImageJ can display, edit, analyze, process, save, and print

8-bit color 8-bit color graphics are a method of storing image information in a computer's memory or in an image file, so that each pixel is represented by 8 bits (1 byte). The maximum number of colors that can be displayed at any one time is 256 per pixel or ...

and grayscale, 16-bit integer, and 32-bit floating point images. It can read many

image file formats An image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for storing 2D images, not 3D ones. The data stored in an image file format may be c ...

, including

TIFF Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

, PNG,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

, BMP,

DICOM Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a technical standard for the digital storage and Medical image sharing, transmission of medical images and related information. It includes a file format definition, which specifies the str ...

, and

FITS Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard defining a digital file format used for storage, transmission and processing of data: formatted as multi-dimensional arrays (for example a 2D image), or tables. FITS is the most commonl ...

, as well as raw formats. ImageJ supports image ''stacks'', a series of images that share a single window, and it is multithreaded, so time-consuming operations can be performed in parallel on multi-CPU hardware. ImageJ can calculate area and pixel value statistics of user-defined selections and intensity-thresholded objects. It can measure distances and angles. It can create density

histogram A histogram is a visual representation of the frequency distribution, distribution of quantitative data. To construct a histogram, the first step is to Data binning, "bin" (or "bucket") the range of values— divide the entire range of values in ...

s and line profile plots. It supports standard image processing functions such as logical and arithmetical operations between images, contrast manipulation,

convolution In mathematics (in particular, functional analysis), convolution is a operation (mathematics), mathematical operation on two function (mathematics), functions f and g that produces a third function f*g, as the integral of the product of the two ...

Fourier analysis In mathematics, Fourier analysis () is the study of the way general functions may be represented or approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions. Fourier analysis grew from the study of Fourier series, and is named after Joseph Fo ...

, sharpening,

smoothing In statistics and image processing, to smooth a data set is to create an approximating function that attempts to capture important patterns in the data, while leaving out noise or other fine-scale structures/rapid phenomena. In smoothing, the d ...

, edge detection, and

median filter The median filter is a non-linear digital filtering technique, often used to remove signal noise, noise from an image, signal, and video. Such noise reduction is a typical pre-processing step to improve the results of later processing (for example ...

ing. It does

geometric transformations In mathematics, a geometric transformation is any bijection of a set to itself (or to another such set) with some salient geometrical underpinning, such as preserving distances, angles, or ratios (scale). More specifically, it is a function who ...

such as

scaling Scaling may refer to: Science and technology Mathematics and physics * Scaling (geometry), a linear transformation that enlarges or diminishes objects * Scale invariance, a feature of objects or laws that do not change if scales of length, energ ...

, rotation, and flips. The program supports any number of images simultaneously, limited only by available memory.

History

Before the release of ImageJ in 1997, a similar freeware image analysis program known as ''NIH Image'' had been developed in

Object Pascal Object Pascal is an extension to the programming language Pascal (programming language), Pascal that provides object-oriented programming (OOP) features such as Class (computer programming), classes and Method (computer programming), methods. T ...

for

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

computers running pre-

OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

operating systems. Further development of this code continues in the form of Image SXM, a variant tailored for physical research of scanning microscope images. A

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

version –

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desig ...

by Scion Corporation (now defunct), so-called ''Scion Image for Windows'' – was also developed. Both versions are still available but – in contrast to NIH Image – closed-source.

References

External links

* ImageJ project * ImageJ 1.x at NIH * ImageJ2
NIH Image OfficialAstroImagej
ImageJ for astronomy with tools for precision photometry {{Image processing software Free DICOM software Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Free science software Laboratory software Public-domain software with source code

Features

History

See also

References

External links