Ymage: A resource for real-time sharing of high resolution digital images.

摘要

Digital images have primarily been viewed using desktop applications. These types of programs attempt to load all of an image's graphical data into memory in order to display the image in its entirety. The method is effective for images that are relatively small, but for large, high-resolution images, this tends to be slow and resource-exhaustive. Coupled with degraded system performance are the issues of storage and image access. Some newer programs make efforts to mitigate these problems, but few do so satisfactorily. The Ymage System was designed as an alternative to conventional approaches for managing and viewing images. The system provides high accessibility to data while minimizing demands on the machine from which the image is viewed. The design accomplishes these objectives and even the initial, low-performance implementation presented here can compete with existing systems. Further, it appears that the flexibility of the design lends itself to use for non-visual applications such as distributed image processing. It is possible that development of the Ymage System could make a significant impact on the approach to the development of image-handling software in the future.