The I4 system is now available for download via the internet . System Design and Philosophy I4 grew out of our need for an open system capable of dealing with 3D and 4D image files. A number of commercial packages deal with such images, but they are uniformly expensive and closed in their design, making them problematic for ongoing research projects. Unfortunately, dealing with 3D and 4D image sets within the confines of a 2D package becomes a more and more arduous collation problem, rather like doing numeric integration on a 4 function pocket calculator. It provides a base functionality and a framework for creating custom tools that can be combined easily with the base set.
Users can do original work without having to reinvent the wheel.
Programs are written to be highly portable. File specifications are independent of underlying hardware or operating system. Simple command line tools exist for a base set of processing functions which may be combined in pipeline or scripts to perform more complex tasks. Standards are defined so that researchers may easily add custom tools that work coorperatively with the base set. I4 instead does most of its image processing as command line scripts.