Introduction

This documentation consists of some HOW TO documentation and some reference documentation. In addition, there are some more formal published papers and a tutorial available from the Gamera website.

Overview

• Gentle overview of Gamera: For a less-detailed idea of what Gamera is and does.

How To

How to use Gamera:

• Building and installing Gamera: The basics to get you started with running Gamera.

• Training tutorial: A step-by-step tutorial about how to build training sets.

• Getting started writing Gamera scripts: How to start writing a Gamera-based application.

• The Gamera GUI: How to use the integrated GUI. Additionally, this describes how to train images.

• matplotlib support: Using Gamera support for the popular matplotlib plotting library.

• Classifier API: How to use image classifiers from Python.

• GA Optimization: How to use the kNN-classifier optimization through genetic algorithms.

How to extend Gamera:

• Writing Gamera plugins: Learn how to write new image methods.

• Specifying arguments for plugin generation and dialog boxes

• The Gamera C++ Image API: How to work with Gamera's images from C++.

• Custom data types in plugins: How to pass, access and return custom data types between C++ and Python.

• Writing Gamera toolkits: How to package your code in a redistributable package that is easier to build and lets you keep your own code separate from the Gamera core.

• Unit testing: How to write and run unit-tests with Gamera.

Reference

• Plugins: Documentation of all the included plugins.

• Directory hierarchy: Where the files are.

• Image types: The different types of images available in Gamera

• RGBPixel: properties of color values in Gamera

• Dimension types: The various classes to manage bounding boxes and geometry.

• ImageData: Manages the underlying image data viewed by Image objects.

• ImageInfo objects: Used to examine on-disk image files without loading them

• XML format: The XML files that Gamera uses to store training data.

Optional libraries that can be useful for some tasks:

• Graph objects: A simple library for dealing with graph structures.

• KdTree objects: A simple library for speeding up two (or higher) dimensional search operations.

Migration from Gamera 2.x to Gamera 3.x

• Major changes from Gamera 2.x to Gamera 3.x

• Migration guide: Describes how to migrate existing Gamera scripts to Gamera 3.x

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Teal Anderson for finding numerous typos among the hideous jargon of these documents.

Some of the material presented here is based on documentation or papers by Karl MacMillan and Ichiro Fujinaga.

Gamera was initially funded through the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative 2 (Award #9817430), an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant, and support from the Lester S. Levy Estate.

These documents were produced using reStructuredText.

The documentation was written by Michael Droettboom and Christoph Dalitz. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this documentation under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) v3.0. In addition, permission is granted to use and/or modify the code snippets from the documentation without restrictions.