Image capturing application for interferometry (and more!) written in Python
Fringes was developed to capture and process interferograms specifically for off-axis digital holography, but is extendable via plugins and can be adapted to a variety of tasks (see below). It also can be considered as a smaller, more lightweight alterative to Micro-Manager, which I tried first, but found too difficult to get to work with my Python data analysis code.
Here are some screenshots to illustrate the rough idea:
Main view
Image viewer with high-pass filter
Live 2D Fourier transform and phase extraction
Fringes should work with pretty much any camera which your operating system can natively recognize, e.g. any camera that can be used as a webcam. However, controlling settings such as exposure time or gain is currently limited to the scientific cameras which I have access to, namely ZWO ASI and The Imaging Source cameras - contributions are highly welcome!
- Main window with zooming, panning and switchable crosshairs for alignment.
- Custom auto-exposure mode that avoids over-saturation.
- High-pass filtering.
- Live 2D Fourier transformation and automatic phase extraction.
- Averaging and sequence recording.
- Data cropping, in order to speed up the plugins.
- Saving images as png or netcdf files - in the latter case, the calibrated x- and y-axis are stored along with the interferogram, if a calibration file is provided
Fringes was written with flexibility in mind. Every tab in the main window is actually a plugin (except main view), and it should be relatively straight-forward to write your own to suit your needs - just use the existing plugins as a template. The advantage of using Python is enabling the user to run the same Python code in a plugin that they will later use for evaluation.
Due to the flexible nature of the program, no executables are provided; a Python3 interpreter is required. The Anaconda Python 3.6 distribution is highly recommended, and the following additional packages are needed:
pyqtgraphpywin32(Windows only, to control The Imaging Source cameras)xarray
Start the program by typing python main.py, or create a shortcut (an icon is provided).
Support of ZWO ASI cameras is accomplished via @stevemarple's excellent python-zwoasi library.