Zooming in with Zegami
Do you remember when taking a photo was more like a game of Russian roulette than trying to capture a simple image. Then even if you did get the picture right you were never quite sure if you took the film out of the camera correctly or that Kodak wouldn’t mess it up when processing. Fast forward 20 years and the digital image revolution has taken over and now with a selfie stick and a phone everyone is potential celebrity and a whole industry has changed.
As amazing as this new technology is, it’s generating considerable amounts of data that’s just getting filed away into ever more powerful computer or even pushed up to the cloud, never to be seen again. But how to retrieve and display these images again isn’t just an issue for your local happy snapper, it’s also a challenge for some of the world’s top research scientists, who are generating vast collections of image data on all manner of systems and research fields.
Although over the last few years the technology to store and transmit this information has improved dramatically, the ability to search or interrogate large image collections has not and is still generally done using basic search or image by image viewing.
Recognising this challenge and seeing an opportunity to develop world leading technology Coritsu Group Australia over the last year has been working on a solution for exactly this problem. How do you manage large collections of image data to not only find the image you are looking for but also to group, sort and filter them to derive some meaningful information.
In conjunction with Stephen Taylor, Head of Computational Biology at the Weatherall Institute Oxford University, the team at Coritsu have taken the outdated and unsupported Microsoft application called PivotViewer and completely rebuilt it naming it Zegami (Or images backwards with a Z).
Zegami is a web based tool built with web standard technologies: JavaScript and CSS as well as leveraging WebGL. In addition there is a back end server which is used to process collections of images into a format that can be quickly displayed, using deepzoom technology similar to that of google maps. This setup allows users to have high resolution images that can be searched and sorted in a fast dynamic and visual way.
So what does Zegami do exactly?
Zegami was born out of the need to be able to visualise large collections of images produced by high throughput microscopy within the area of genetic research. However after completing the minimal viable product of the software in October 2014 we discovered that Zegami has many other uses outside of just microscopy, some of which include:
• X-ray and MRI scans
• Student Management
• Security and Defence
• Asset management
• Document management
• Shopping
So how does it work?
Zegami allows users to display currently up to 40,000 images on a screen and then, using either the metadata panel on the left or the top tool bar, search, sort, filter and group images in a truly unique and dynamic way. Then once you have found the item/s you are looking for you can either view them individually or export a list for further analysis. The solution however is not just limited to images anymore, they could be movies, documents, 3D objects or even image stacks the possibilities are endless.
So if you’re interested in checking out its functionality go to http://demo.zegami.com
The solution has been built with the plugin methodology in mind so it’s completely extensible with the ability to map to different data bases, add additional views or functionality and is also non device specific. All functionality that was unimaginable with the old versions of the software.
Who is using the software?
As Zegami is still very new and has in reality only been on the market for a couple of months, the response we have been getting is quiet amazing, from research facilities globally to asset management companies, the applications and interest in the technology continues to grow every day.
Two markets that have shown considerable interest so far are schools and physical asset management companies, both struggle with the same issue having the one portal that gives them all the information they need about a particular asset or student and then being able to do analysis on the entire data set to find groups of items in ways that were just unthinkable before without a business analyst trawling through the data for hours on end.
Check out our demo site for more applications
What does the future hold?
Due to the success of the initial project with Oxford and the potential application of the software, myself and Roger Noble (MD and CTO of Coritsu Group) are in the process of setting up a spinout company with Stephen Taylor from the Weatherall Institute and Oxford University itself to continue to drive the development and the application of the software globally, whilst Coritsu Group will become resellers and implementation partners within Australia.
The real challenge now begins, taking an amazing developers toolset and turning it into an application that has global appeal.
So if you are intrigued by the software and want to challenge us by taking your data and turning it into a demo collection, then please do not hesitate to drop us an email. You never know Zegami might be the tool set to help you find just what you have been looking for.
Samuel Conway is Managing Director at Coritsu Group.