Tiled browser interface

[ctrueden]

When visualizing extremely large image planes, it is necessary to load the plane in tiles, displaying only those portions that are currently visible, and caching tiles at several zoom levels, similar to BrainMaps.org or Google Maps.

ImageJ 1.x provides a mechanism, the virtual stack, for handling very large datasets one image plane at a time. But there is no mechanism for working with image planes larger than 2 GPix (32-bit array indexing limit) and/or available memory—e.g., 40Kx40Kx16-bit = 2.98GB. ImgLib2 Cell images handle images planes of this size, but making it work in the legacy interface is another story.

Migrated-From: http://trac.imagej.net/ticket/43, http://trac.imagej.net/ticket/19

[ctrueden]

Depends on scifio/scifio#125.

[ctrueden]

These days, there is the BigDataViewer (BDV), which offers this functionality. In future, we will work to integrate BDV into ImageJ more intelligently, so that e.g. when you open an image that is too large for ImageJ1's default viewer, BDV will be used automatically.