Gerbil - A Novel Software Framework for Visualization and Analysis in the Multispectral Domain

Multispectral imaging has been gaining popularity and has been gradually applied to many fields besides remote sensing. Multispectral data provides unique information about material classification and reflectance analysis in general. However, due to the high dimensionality of the data, both human observers as well as computers, have difficulty interpreting this wealth of information. We present a new software package that facilitates the visualization of the relationship between spectral and topological information in a novel fashion. It puts emphasis on the spectral gradient, which is shown to provide enhanced information for many reflectance analysis tasks. It also includes a rich toolbox for evaluation of image segmentation and other algorithms in the multispectral domain. We combine the parallel coordinates visualization technique with hashing for a highly interactive visual connection between spectral distribution, spectral gradient and topology. The framework is released as open-source, has a modern cross-platform design and is well integrated into existing established computer vision software (OpenCV).