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Premier repeatedly pauses and STATUS BAR shows "CREATING RECIPE CHANNEL IMAGES" . . .

mbatchelormbatchelor
in Image-Pro Automation (Macros, Apps, Reports)
All --

I'm working on a PREMIER APPLICATION that includes a SMART SEGMENTATION and an associated COUNT that generates several hundred objects.

After the APP does the COUNT, there are several other steps in the macro but it seems that PREMIER spends a tremendous amount of time performing what the status bar says is

    CREATING RECIPE CHANNEL IMAGES (PRESS ESC TO CANCEL)

I have a theory that the SMART SEGMENTATION is updating something in preparation for another COUNT operation but that seems unnecessary.

I'm thinking that I can switch to AUTO DARK or AUTO BRIGHT SEGMENTATION and then just not do a COUNT but I'm hoping there is a more elegant way to stop PREMIER from this wasted effort.

Please let me know the best course of action to take here.

Thanks.

-- Matt

Best Answers

  • YuriGYuriG
    Answer ✓
    Hi Matt,

    I didn't know that the bar was moving. In that case that's the correct behavior, your recipe just have too many channels. If you use just top 3, you have to switch off all other channels when you finished Learning stage, in that case only 3 channel images will be created when you run the macro with this recipe.

    Yuri
  • YuriGYuriG
    Answer ✓
    Hi Matt,

    Yes, you suggestion of adding "Switch off insignificant channels" (or something like that) is good, we will add it in the next versions.
    Having many channel, even not currently significant, is useful only on learning stage. Note, that learning can be performed on multiple images and even after loading a recipe from file in another session. In that case some insignificant channels may become significant based on new reference objects.
    When the teaching stage is finished, all insignificant channels should be switched off to speed up processing and reduce memory consumption. So the button your suggested will be very useful.

    Regards,

    Yuri

Answers

  • YuriGYuriG
    Hi Matt,

    The message is, probably just left in the status bar after the last smart segmentation operation, it doesn't mean that the program is creating images in background. The message should go away after any other operation that updates status bar. If you can send me a short macro that causes this message, I will check the problem.

    General note about smart segmentation: smart segmentation creates separate image for every active channel.If you select ALL, it will create 20+ images per frame. In most cases using of all channels is not necessary, ALL channels should be used only on the development stage when you don't know what channels are significant and perform learning segmentation to find the weights. You can check the weights of the channels and use only a couple of them with highest weight. It can significantly speed up the processing and reduce memory footprint of the operation.

    If you see that Auto-dark or Auto-bright produce acceptable results, you can certainly use them instead of smart segmentation, which will be much faster. Smart segmentation should be used on images where threshold based methods don't work, for example of images with non-uniform background, when you need texture segmentation, when segmentation requires combination of multiple channels or preprocessing that can be a part of segmentation recipe.

    Regards,

    Yuri
  • mbatchelormbatchelor
    Yuri --

    Thank you for your prompt response.

    Re your paragraph 1 . . .

    Since the PROGRESS BAR is actively moving through its range, I think the

        CREATING RECIPE CHANNEL IMAGES (PRESS ESC TO CANCEL)

    is not remnant of HISTORIC ACTIVITY but an indicator of CURRENT ACTIVITY.

    Would it be possible to WEBEX or TEAMVIEWER to show you this activity? 

    Re your paragraph 2 . . .

    The SMART SEGMENTATION TOOL is set to:

        ** AUTO WEIGHT
        and
        ** TOP 3

    as shown in

        2014-04-18-101455.jpg

    I the current configuration already matches with your advice.

    Re your paragraph 3 . . .

    My thoughts about the turning on AUTO BRIGHT (AUTO DARK) SEGMENTATION option was not meant as an alternative for actually finding the OBJECTS (that did not work) but as a possible configuration to use after the SMART SEGMENTATION COUNT was done to keep PREMIER from running through the CREATING RECIPE operation repeatedly.

    Thanks again.

    -- Matt
  • mbatchelormbatchelor
    Yuri --

    I interpreted your advice to suggest that I examine the RECIPE to identify the

        TOP 3 SEGMENTATION CHANNELS

    and then to go into the

        ** COLOR
        ** BACKG
        ** MORPHO

    options and deactivate the CHANNELS that were not "TOP 3".

    I have done this (as shown in 2014-04-18-110825.jpg) and now the amount of time that the

        CREATING RECIPE CHANNEL IMAGES (PRESS ESC TO CANCEL)

    MESSAGE and affiliated PROGRESS BAR are displayed is *m*u*c*h* less.

    If the performance of the program (which will have to process hundreds of images) needs to be optimized, I may still switch to an AUTO DARK or AUTO BRIGHT configuration *a*f*t*e*r* SMART SEGMENTATION has done its count so that this RECIPE thing is not an issue.

    Can you and your associates please consider the following feature request . . .

    Create a mechanism to AUTOMATICALLY DISABLE the UNUSED CHANNELS within SMART SEGMENTATION.  It took me 22 clicks to MANUALLY DISABLE the UNUSED CHANNELS.

    Thanks again for identifying the issue and pointing me toward a solution.

    -- Matt
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