30 july 2002
cmd line programs stable

1. INTRODUCTION
===============

1.1 GENERAL DESCRIPTION
=======================

PHILOSOPHY

GPIV-TOOLS is a set of command-line driven programs for the 
so-called Digital Particle Image Velocimetry (DPIV). It contains
programs for image pre-processing, image analyses (resulting in 
particle displacement estimations, i.e. PIV data), validation on
peak-locking effects and erroneous vectors (outliers) and post-processing
functions for calculating (scalar) derivatives of the PIV data, like
vorticity and strain.

GPIV-TOOLS uses LIBGPIV intensively, that can be found in a separate
distribution, where the core functions resides. Some (perl) scripts
are included in the GPIV-TOOLS package, too, that control the
command-line driven programs. These scripts are provided as examples
that may be used and adapted for processing a defined chain of
analyses, validation and post-processing or for batch-processing of a
series of images/piv-data sets etc.

Though the command-line driven tools are mainly intended for
non-graphic processing, its outputs may be visualized by displaying
with the aid of GNUPLOT or PLOTMTV. A Graphic User Interface program
is available in the separate package GPIV. This program controls all
the processes interactively and displays its results in a more
advanced way. GPIV has been written with the aid of the GTK/GNOME
libraries.

The GPIV-TOOLS have been written in ANSI-C. It has been developed, and
is operational, on a i386 computer running the LINUX Operating System
and should work on any Unix-like platform, too.



2.1 LICENSE
===========

is Free Software licensed under the GNU
Public license terms. See the COPYING file for the license.


 
2.2 WARRANTY
============

This software is constantly under development. So, often, bugs and
improvements are underway.
      The reliability of code rr has been tested with artificially generated
PIV images (home brewed as well as by others) and with images obtained
from experiments. The experimental data have been compared with
analyzes from third-party software (mainly DaVies from LaVision INC). 
      Though the software has been used by the author already for different
projects, no warranty can be given. I would like to emphasize that the
software is constantly under development. Any remarks on malfunction,
improvements, new features are welcome.



3 COMPILATION AND INSTALLATION
================================
See INSTALL for a more extended description.

Unpacking and compilation:
gzip -d gpiv-0.2.tar.gz
tar -xvf gpiv-0.2.tar
./configure
make
make install

To remove the package from the system:
make uninstall



4.1 USE OF THE GPIV-TOOLS
========================

In order to understand how the programs work, just type the program
name with -h option. For the majority of the programs there are manual
pages as well. Every program needs its specific parameters. The
program parameters may be defined in a parameter file with its
specific process key and parameter name. The image parameters of raw
data images may be defined in a header file (filename.h), followed by
its value. All required parameters can be defined in order of
priority:

- as a command line option.
- in the image header ./filename.h or in the local parameter file ./gpivrc.
- in the personal parameter file ~/.gpivrc.
- in the system-wide parameter file (mostly in /etc/gpivrc).


5. FINAL REMARKS
=================

I hope that the programs will work fine and that you'll enjoy
them. Remarks and suggestions for improvements/additions are welcome.

Gerber van der Graaf