vif

Documentation

vif is a set of library and tools built to provide user-friendly vector data manipulation, as offered in interpreted languages like IDL, its open source clone GDL, or Python and numpy, but with the added benefit of C++: increased robustness, and optimal speed.

The library can be split into two components:

  • The “core” library
  • The “support” library

The core library introduces the vec type (a “data vector”), which is the most important data type in vif, while the support library provides functions and other tools to manipulate these vectors and perform common tasks. You can think of vif as a separate language inside C++, where the core library defines this language, and the support library is the the “standard” library where all the useful functions are stored.

Below is a code sample written in vif that illustrates the most basic functionalities.

using namespace vif;                // import everything in current namespace
vec2f img = fits::read("img.fits"); // read a FITS image
img -= median(img);                 // subtract the median of the whole image
float imax = max(img);              // find the maximum of the image
vec1u ids = where(img > 0.5*imax);  // find pixels at least half as bright
float sum = total(img[ids]);        // compute the sum of these pixels
img[ids] = log(img[ids]/sum);       // modify these pixels with a logarithm
fits::write("new.fits", img);       // save the modified image to a FITS file