VISROCK, Version 1.0

The visrock program was written to facilitate interactive analysis of series of digital X-ray images. The main focus is on series of digital X-ray diffraction topographs (i.e. the method named Rocking Curve Imaging - RCI), although the area of potential applications of the program is broader and includes radiography, tomography, crystallographic fine slicing, detector calibration, and others.

The functionality of visrock combines interactive data visualization with advanced numerical analysis. Images can be zoomed, processed, converted to other formats etc. with few mouse clicks. A special focus is on intensity profiles of individual pixels across an image series; these are easily selected and extracted interactively. Numerical analysis capabilities are centered around the typical requirements in Rocking Curve Imaging (determination of peak positions and widths, statistical moments, Gaussian fits, perpendicular 2D slices from 3D data blocks), but also implement a range of more general image processing operations (noise reduction, correlation functions, histogram calculations etc.).


Screenshot of the visrock program in a typical analysis situation
(data acquired in a rocking curve imaging experiment on ESRF-Beamline ID19).

The program was developed using the IDL programming language, and is distributed as an IDL precompiled executable. It will run on any operating system for which IDL is available, notably on Windows, Linux, UNIX and others. Use of visrock presupposes that IDL has been installed on your system. An IDL license is not required, however; almost all of the functionality of visrock (with very few exceptions) is available also in the unlicensed version of IDL. Details on licensing and installation are described in the visrock manual.

An overview of the functions and possibilities of the program has been published in an article in Journal of Applied Crystallography:

D. Lübbert and T. Baumbach, Visrock: a program for digital topography and X-ray microdiffraction imaging, J. Appl. Cryst. (2007). 40, 595-597

This article can and should be cited whenever users publish results obtained essentially with the help of the visrock program.

Corresponding with the author: Daniel Lübbert

 

Manual

IDL Executable