Photutils Plan 2014

This is a link collection to photutils-related documents, discussions, codes, papers, ... we'll use it to plan the photutils work for summer 2014.

Plan

These are some of the points we should discuss / decide:

What's the timeline, requirements for photutils to become astropy.photometry? Should there be photutils releases (see milestones) so that we can get more people to try it out?
Who takes lead on updating the photutils API document? Do we need to look at generalised WCS and ccdproc or are those independent?
What's the timeline for including findobj? (see here)
Should we use scikit-image as a dependency for photutils? E.g. findobj.moments is basically a copy of scikit-image code (see here) and many image analysis and measurement methods are available in scikit-image, e.g. blob detection. It would be great to have wrappers for those in photutils that work with world coordinates.

Astropy Photometry API proposal: photometry.py and associated discussion. There's more discussion here and here.

This is mostly from 2012 and since then Astropy has come a long way (e.g. quantities, coordinates) and several new parts are in progress (e.g. generalised WCS, ccdproc) We probably should re-discuss the astropy.photometry API and have an updated API proposal before Brigitta starts her GSoC.
Brigitta Sipőcz - Accepted GSoC 2014 proposal, blog "Astropy: Enhancing the photutils package functionality"
Axel Donath - GSoC 2013 blog, proposal
Generalized WCS API proposal, code by Nadia Dencheva (@nden).

The following codes are relevant for photutils (the future astropy.photometry).

findobj: code, docs : Larry Bradley (@larrybradley)

A package to identify stars and estimate source morphological parameters in an astronomical image.

Planned to be integrated into photutils ... discussion here.
astropy.ccdproc code, docs, API proposal (not merged) ccdproc_api.py and discussion.
Scikit-image webpage, code, docs

Image processing in Python.

The following codes contain related functionality, but are not directly relevant for photutils API or implementation.

montage-wrapper : Tom Robitaille (@astrofrog) webpage docs code

Python wrapper for the Montage mosaicking toolkit
python-reprojection : Tom Robitaille (@astrofrog) code

Python-based Astronomical image reprojection
https://github.com/radio-astro-tools/spectral-cube

"This package aims to facilitate the reading, writing, manipulation, and analysis of spectral data cubes." Is photometry for spectral data cubes in scope or out of scope for photutils?
https://github.com/durga2112/imagecube

An independent Astropy affiliated package? maintained?
C library for Source Extraction and Photometry code and docs : Kyle Barbary (@kbarbary)

A re-implementation of SExtractor background estimation and detection. GPL3 license, so can't be used by Astropy / photutils.
Adam Ginsburg is implementing some FITS_tools and image_registration methods.
There's some image handling functions in gammapy.image that should either go into Astropy or Photutils ... e.g. block_reduce_hdu.
Eric Sheldon (@esheldon) has written C code with Python wrapper to interpolate and reconstruct PSFEx images here (no license mentioned).
Dustin Lang (@dstndstn) and David Hogg are working on a GPL-licensed tractor.