Improving scientific image processing accessibility through development of graphical user interfaces for scikit-image

Abstract

Catalyst informatics has garnered a lot of attention within the research community as it is a very powerful method for discovering and understanding catalysts from the data perspective. However, while the availability of image data such as microscopy data is also growing exponentially, image analysis has not enjoyed the same degree of success as cases that deal with textual or numerical data. Not only are there not many tools available for image processing, but also the tools that do exist require a large degree of experience with programming and computer science, limiting the number of people who are able to conduct image processing. Thus, there is a growing need for accessible tools geared towards image processing and segmentation. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for image processing tools offered by Python library scikit-image are developed and implemented in previously developed catalyst informatics platform CADS (https://cads.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/). Architecture and development of the GUIs are investigated and several cases of image processing are explored.