IOLink capabilities, for now and future.

Now

What is available in IOLink for now...

Basic types

IOLink provides some elementary containers (Vector, VectorX, Array, VariantDataValue) and also some basic types to handle data (Region, RegionX, DataType, Uri). It helps for inter-operability.

Handle multi-dimensional arrays

IOLink is able to handle all kinds of image data (2D, volumetric, multispectral, video, ...)

Out of core support

Data don't need to be fully loaded in memory and can be accessed region by region from a file, in local (disk) or remote (through HTTP)

Simple use

User code is significantly reduced when upgrading to DataModel. It eases readability.

"How to store" has no impact on "How to access" for user

Users don't need to do specific conversion to read data, wherever data comes from and how it is encoded.

Improve safety

IOLink mechanisms should prevent users to do invalid operations (high-level methods are provided to support users in their data manipulation)

Thread safety

Initially, IOLink was designed for multithreaded environments. However, thread safety mechanisms are not active by default to avoid performances issues with certain customer codes.

Binary compatibility

In the same major version of IOLink, binary compatibility is ensured to avoid symbol conflict in a same application, and permit object sharing between the different versions.

Netherless, there are some possible issues with different versions of IOLink loaded by different components of a same application. See DLL issue chapter.

Interoperability

IOLink is now interoperable with NumPy arrays (>= v1.17.4) for Python users.

Multi-resolution access

IOLink provides an interface for multi-resolution-image.

What's next?

What should be available in IOLink soon...

Access to data

IOLink is able to handle other kind of formats (meshes could be the next step)

Select and retrieve image location for each data (CPU, GPU, Disk…)

IOLink could provide the origin of the data, whatever it is located. IOLink could handle GPU data.

Communication between IOLink users

Users of the same data could be informed of any modification done by a mechanism of listeners.

Interoperability

Interoperability with Imaging, OpenCV, OpenGL are seriously considered.

GPU memory

IOLink could provide services to handle images in GPU memory for better performances