AIMTools boosts mobile image quality
Accusoft Pegasus has announced a software development kit (SDK) to create mobile applications that provide a more faithful reproduction of images.
AIMTools is a new mobile imaging SDK for iOS and Android devices that enables viewing of 12-bit grayscale images and provides more control over output of image data than is offered by the mobile JPEG library.
In February 2011, the US FDA approved the first diagnostic radiology application for viewing images and making medical diagnoses on mobile devices.
"This important mobile technology provides physicians with the ability to immediately view images and make diagnoses without having to be back at the workstation or wait for film," said William Maisel, M.D., M.P.H., chief scientist and deputy director for science in the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health.
The AIMTools Lossy JPEG decompress library enables developers writing mobile applications to work with all of the data in the 12-bit image, no longer requiring them to convert on the server to an 8-bit image for display. Until now, applications converted 12-bit images to 8-bit on the server prior to sending the images to a mobile display device. This conversion resulted in image data loss before the image even got to the mobile device.
With the AIMTools SDK, users can now view 12-bit grayscale images on the iPad, iPhone, and Android enabled devices. Image brightness and contrast data can be more accurately adjusted by using the window level data at decompress time on the mobile device to accurately map the correct 12-bit data to an 8-bit image displayed.
AIMTools also provides more granular control of lossy JPEG decompress output than is available on iOS and Android. Developers can now output directly to a thumbnail on decompress or decompress a specific crop rectangle of the image. Additionally, color support is available for RGB and CMYK JPEG decompression on mobile devices.
AIMTools will soon expand imaging functionality on mobile devices by adding support for Lossless JPEG and JPEG 2000.