design.txt

Usage Scenario:

ImageStack is intended to be used as a command line image manipulation program from within a shell such as bash. 

ImageStack can also be compiled and used as a library. It's preferable to do this for experimental code (as opposed to modifying 
imagestack itself).


Current Design Goals:

- Provide an extensive set of tools for manipulating arbitrarily sized 2D images in arbitrary color spaces with float precision.

- Be able to manipulate 3D volumes of data without obfuscating or compromising support for the above.

- Be able to manipulate 4D light fields without obfuscating or compromising support for either of the above.

- Be able to manipulate 1D sounds without obfuscating or compomising support for any of the above.

- Be as modular as possible with respect to operations. All code concerning an operation should be in the one place. It should be easy to add and remove operations.

- Provide documentation for every operation.

- Can be developed and used on any system that supports gcc/makefiles. 

- Be as simple as possible.

- Use only dependencies that are:
  - Cross platform
  - Easy to compile
  - Widely available



Future Design Goals:

- Provide a clean API to the library from Python.

- Be compilable in IDEs such as msvc or xcode.