source: tags/release-1.1.11b/CHANGES

Last change on this file was 813, checked in by MatthewWhiting, 13 years ago

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1Duchamp version 1.1.11 (2011/02/25)
2-------------------------------------
3
4Improvements:
5
6* The largest changes in this release involved improving the
7  efficiency of the code, resulting in further speed-ups. The code
8  affected was the low-level object-handling code, with the merging
9  stages in particular showing good speed-ups.
10
11* The default value for the beam size, when the beam parameters are
12  not in the FITS header, has been dropped. Now the default behaviour
13  is to simply not make any beam corrections if the beam is not
14  specified by either the FITS file or the input parameters. Thanks to
15  Tobias Westemeier for the suggestion.
16
17* The reporting of the beam size has changed slightly to provide a bit
18  more information.
19
20Bug Fixes:
21
22* There was a problem with using a MW range and subsectioning when
23  growing objects, as a result of changes in 1.1.10. This has been
24  fixed.
25
26* Inversion was failing when no array was allocated (not a problem for
27  standard Duchamp, but affected its use as a library by other code).
28
29* Writing text spectra would only occur when PGPlot output was enabled
30  in the build (it was combined with the plotting of the spectral
31  graphs). This has been changed so that this output can be requested
32  without requiring PGPlot.
33
34* The equation for the beam size in Sec.4.2 of the User Guide was
35  incorrect and has been fixed.
36
37Duchamp version 1.1.10 (2010/11/15)
38-------------------------------------
39
40Improvements:
41
42* The major change for this release is a greatly improved growing
43  algorithm. The previous incarnation was very inefficient (testing
44  all pixels in an object, most of which only have neighbours that are
45  already in the object), and could take an unnecessarily large amount
46  of time in the case of extended sources. The improved algorithm
47  makes use of voxel flags to quickly identify those voxels not yet in
48  an object and only examines them. For a certain test case
49  (observations of extended Galactic HI), the time required reduced
50  from about a day to about a minute! (Note that compact sources, such
51  as HI galaxies, will not show this degree of speedup...) Many thanks
52  to Tara Murphy for pointing out this bug and her help in
53  diagnosing/fixing the problem.
54
55* There have been a number of further improvements to the code to
56  speed it up, based on some profiling. The most important was the
57  function to add pixels to a 2D object, but there were several other
58  minor changes as well.
59
60* The minimum size of the detections can now also be specified in
61  terms of the total number of voxels (in addition or instead of
62  specifying the minimum spatial pixels or channels).
63
64* The way memory is allocated when reading the image has been
65  streamlined. The amount of memory being allocated is also now
66  reported - this is in an effort to allow users to identify problems
67  with running out of memory.
68
69* The version number is now reported in the results and log files.
70
71* Only the filename of the input image (ie. not the leading
72  directories) is now shown on the detection and moment-0 maps. This
73  is to avoid problems with large directory paths being too wide for
74  the plot.
75
76* The verification script was improved for readability (although no
77  functional change was made).
78
79Bug fixes:
80
81* Growing was not being done when a single source was found. Now
82  fixed.
83
84* For particular WCS setups, the RA can be interpreted as being
85  negative, which corrupted the Source ID (ie. the IAU-format
86  string). This has been fixed.
87
88* When the flux units were changed, problems had been seen when
89  writing a reconstructed cube to a FITS file. Any unit change is now
90  undone prior to writing and there should now be no problem.
91
92* Filenames with spaces in them were not handled well. New functions
93  were included and moved to a more obvious location. These filenames
94  now work as expected.
95
96* Spectral axes of type FREQ that had a rest frequency were not being
97  put into velocity units. Now fixed.
98
99* Improvements to the output to screen, making sure everything is
100  covered by the verbose flag.
101
102* Better management of the allocation of arrays.
103
104* The minSize parameter in Image was never initialised, leading to
105  unpredictable behaviour. Now fixed.
106
107Code development notes:
108
109* New functionality includes: a function to return a vector list of
110  voxels in an Object3D or Detection; a new generic Search function
111  (basically a front-end to each of the individual functions); more
112  complete copy constructors for the DataArray classes; new methods
113  for finding the velocity widths.
114
115Duchamp version 1.1.9 (2010/03/26)
116-------------------------------------
117
118Improvements:
119
120* There is now the ability to save the moment-0 map as a FITS
121  file. This is controlled by the parameters flagOutputMomentMap and
122  fileOutputMomentMap, which work in the same way for the mask file.
123
124* There is a new parameter flagRejectBeforeMerge that, when true,
125  rejects sources according to the minPix/minChannels requirements
126  before the merging and growing is done. This defaults to false (so
127  default behaviour is as before). Thanks to Tobias Westmeier for
128  suggesting this and the above improvement.
129
130* There is also a new parameter flagTwoStageMerging. When true (the
131  default), newly-detected objects are merged with the first close
132  object in the list. When false, they are simply added to the end of
133  the list. In both cases, a second round of merging is done to pick
134  up all close matches.
135
136* The way the beam is specified in the absence of the BMAJ/BMIN/BPA
137  parameters has been slightly changed. The use of "beamSize" was
138  somewhat ambiguous (it meant the number of pixels covered by the
139  beam, not the FWHM), so new parameters have been introduced. The
140  beam can be specified by beamArea (which replaces beamSize), or
141  beamFWHM (the FWHM of the beam in pixels). If beamFWHM is provided,
142  it will be used, else the beamArea will be.
143
144* There is a new parameter searchType that allows the user to choose
145  how the searching is done. The behaviour up till now has been to
146  search the 2D channel maps one at a time to build up the 3D
147  detections. This is the default, and can be obtained by setting
148  searchType=spatial. Alternatively, you can set searchType=spectral
149  to do the searching in the 1D spectra.
150
151* Profiling of the code has led to a few changes that have sped up
152  some calculations, particularly those involving the median. Rather
153  than using std::sort, the code now simply uses std::nth_element,
154  which shows a substantial speedup factor.
155
156* When using the objectList parameter, the maps will now only show the
157  selected objects, rather than all detected objects.
158
159* There is a new verification test that looks at the "growing"
160  functionality.
161
162Bug fixes:
163
164* When saving a mask FITS file, there was an occasional memory leak
165  that caused Duchamp to crash (only when the cube was suitably
166  large). This has been fixed.
167
168* The median calculation had a bug that led to an incorrect value
169  being reported. The difference will not be great (the element of an
170  array being reported as the median was out by one), but could be
171  noticeable depending on the dataset.
172
173* The MW range parameters did not respond to the use of a
174  subsection. They should refer to channel ranges in the original
175  cube, and changes have been made to the code to reflect this.
176
177* There was an occasional error in writing out FITS keywords, due to
178  the way comment strings were intialised. This has been improved and
179  made more robust.
180
181* Testing with gcc-4.3.2 showed a number of compilation warnings &
182  errors, which have been fixed.
183
184* The Gaussian smoothing kernel was too small - it is now made big
185  enough to encompass all possible values. It was also being
186  incorrectly scaled. This had no functional effect on the detection
187  of objects, but for other uses was incorrect. This has been
188  rectified.
189
190* Some outputs that weren't caught by the verbose flag now are.
191
192
193Code development notes:
194
195  The following notes only apply if you want to use the code as a
196  library, rather than the stand-alone package. These have generally
197  come out of the ASKAP software development. If you just use the
198  stand-alone package, they won't be a concern.
199
200* The API for storing detected objects has changed, making it more
201  robust from a programming point of view.
202
203* Additional versions of some functions (and the Gaussian smoothing
204  class) have been added - this has come out of the ASKAP development
205  work.
206
207* A number of instances of "unsigned int" being used for loops have
208  been changed to iterators or "size_t". There shouldn't be any
209  functional change from this -- the code should just build more
210  cleanly.
211
212* The Detection class now records whether the parameters have been
213  set, and unsets that flag when objects are merged. This allows
214  external programs to track which objects have been merged and deal
215  with them appropriately.
216
217
218Duchamp version 1.1.8 (2009/07/20)
219----------------------------------
220
221Improvements:
222
223* The final source list can now be sorted on one of a range of object
224  parameters: x-value, y-value, z-value, ra, dec, vel, w50, iflux,
225  pflux (integrated and peak flux respectively), or snr. Simply use
226  the new input parameter sortingParam. Its default value is vel, so
227  the default behaviour stays the same.
228
229* The FDR method involves calculating how many pixels are
230  correlated. This previously involved multiplying the beam area by 2,
231  implying that 2 neighbouring channels were correlated. This factor
232  is now a user-selectable parameter, so that if you know how many
233  spectral channels should be correlated, you can set the parameter
234  FDRnumCorChan and the FDR calculation will be done correctly.
235
236* Screen output now has more information on the growing threshold when
237  the cube statistics are printed.
238
239
240Bug fixes:
241
242* When reading in previous detections, there was a bug causing a
243  segmentation fault. This has been fixed and made more robust.
244
245* There was an apparent bug when writing out the reconstructed cubes
246  to a FITS file that caused the new file to be very large. Changing
247  the cfitsio function used has fixed this.
248
249* Using NCP projections near the equator could result in a large
250  stream of error messages, due to coordinate transformations being
251  done in blank regions outside of the acceptable range of world
252  coordinates. This has been fixed.
253
254* The function that grows objects had a major bug, that stopped it
255  working when flagAdjacent=false. This has been fixed and should work
256  fine.
257
258* The input parameter spectraTextFile was not being read
259  properly. This has been remedied.
260
261* The units for the integrated flux were wrong for some types of pixel
262  flux units. This has been fixed.
263
264* A minor bug caused incorrect calculation of the 20% widths.
265
266* All calls to uint were changed to unsigned int, as some compilers
267  had problems recognising that they were the same thing.
268
269* src/fitsHeader.cc was missing an include statement for stdlib.h,
270  again causing some compilers to fail.
271
272
273Duchamp version 1.1.7 (2009/01/16)
274----------------------------------
275
276Improvements:
277
278* The mask file that can be created with flagMask can now specify
279  which object a given detected pixel belongs to, by taking the object
280  ID as its value. This applies if you set flagMaskWithObjectNum=true
281  (it defaults to false, which means each detected pixel has the value
282  1). Non-detected pixels still have the value 0.
283
284* The names of the output FITS files are now able to be specified
285  directly by input parameters. These will override the default names
286  that Duchamp provides.
287
288* The Karma annotation file now specifies a font - previously it did
289  not and so was at the mercy of whatever was specified in other
290  annotation files being viewed at the same time. Please let me know
291  if the font I've chosen (lucidasans-12) is not suitable.
292
293* The default flag, used in the absence of 'E', 'S' or 'N', is now '-'
294  rather than blank. This will ensure that each column in the results
295  file has something in it.
296
297* The configure script is somewhat more robust to non-standard
298  systems, particularly when the X11 libraries are in unusual
299  places. It can also deal with the slightly different way that
300  wcslib-4.3 installs itself.
301
302* The installation part of the Makefile was altered so that the
303  symbolic link Duchamp that points to Duchamp-1.1.7 does not have the
304  absolute path encoded in it. This will enable the files to be moved
305  around at a later date.
306
307Bug Fixes:
308
309* Fixed a bug that caused problems when the flux units were less than
310  5 characters long (e.g. 'K')
311
312* The new velocity width values were not getting proper headers in the
313  VOTable output. This has been remedied.
314
315* Minor improvements to help non-pgplot use
316
317* Minor fix in WCS functionality.
318
319* Minor fixes to the FitsHeader class.
320
321* Improved FITS data reading, that doesn't require a nullarray
322  array. This will reduce memory usage.
323
324* Improved subsection parsing, particularly for non-standard WCS
325  systems.
326
327* Improving the memory allocation of the Cube class.
328
329* Fixed a bug that meant the growthThreshold values were sometimes
330  being lost.
331
332* Improving the way the growing and merging is done, particularly in
333  the case of non-adjacent merging.
334
335* Fixed a scaling bug in the GaussSmooth function.
336
337Other:
338
339* Numerous changes to the code that do not affect how Duchamp itself
340  runs, but were necessary for code development with the Duchamp
341  libraries (primarily as a part of the ASKAP code development).
342
343
344Duchamp version 1.1.6 (2008/09/08)
345----------------------------------
346
347New features:
348
349* The velocity widths can now be quoted in two additional ways: the
350  full width at 50% of the peak flux (ie. the FWHM) and the full width
351  at 20% of the peak flux (w_50 and w_20 respectively). The w_50
352  parameter is now quoted in the results printed to the screen
353  (instead of w_VEL), but all three are written to the results file.
354
355* The facility now exists to bypass the searching step and go straight
356  to the output stage using a list of previously detected objects. The
357  list is extracted from a previously-created log file. The user can
358  change the way the spectra are plotted (e.g. choose to plot
359  integrated rather than peak spectra), and select a subset of the
360  detected objects to be printed to individual postscript files. Use
361  the input parameter usePrevious (set to true) to use this facility,
362  and provide a list of objects using the objectList parameter
363  (eg. 1,2,4,7-10,15)
364
365* A new parameter "growthThreshold" has been created, that goes with
366  "threshold". If you manually specify a threshold, and you wish to
367  grow detections, you need to manually specify a growthThreshold (in
368  flux units).
369
370Bug fixes:
371
372* Cubes that do not have a spectral axis (such as Stokes cubes) were
373  causing memory leaks and crashing, due to some assumptions of the
374  existence of the spectral axis. These bugs have been fixed, so that
375  Duchamp will run on such cubes, although the WCS transforms may not
376  always work appropriately. Please let me know via bug reports of
377  difficulties you encounter!
378
379* The growing function has had a few bugs fixed and is now more
380  efficient.
381
382* The FDR method was previously overriding any manually-specified
383  threshold. This has been fixed so that if the user specifies
384  threshold=X, then the FDR method is not called.
385
386* Some undefined things were happening with textual output when no
387  objects were detected. This has been fixed.
388
389* Memory leaks caused by FITS WCS irregularities have been fixed
390  (specifically, if a FITS header had NAXIS=2 but more than two WCS
391  axes were defined).
392
393
394
395Duchamp version 1.1.5 (2008/03/20)
396----------------------------------
397
398Bug fixes:
399* A major bug was discovered in the calculation of integrated
400  fluxes. The flux was incorrectly being weighted by the spatial size
401  of the detection, resulting in a (often considerable) overestimation
402  of the integrated flux. This has been corrected.
403
404* The beam size calculation was also incorrect, being out by a factor
405  of 1/ln(2).
406
407* The "make install" command previously failed to work properly if the
408  library had not been created. This has been fixed so that the
409  installation works even if there is no library file.
410
411New Features:
412* You can now provide a new flux unit string, so that the pixel fluxes
413  will be converted to these new fluxes before any calculations are
414  done. This is done with the newFluxUnits input parameter. The new
415  units should be directly convertible from the old ones (given by the
416  BUNIT header -- e.g. if BUNIT = Jy/beam, you can give newFluxUnits
417  as mJy/beam, but not mJy).
418
419* You can now specify the precision used in the output files for flux,
420  velocity and S/N ratio columns, via new input parameters precFlux,
421  precVel and precSNR. These will apply to the VOTable output as well
422  as the text table and information on the spectral plots.
423
424* The Karma annotation files previously provided just a circle at the
425  spatial location of the detected object. You now have the option to
426  draw a border around the detected pixels (in a similar manner to the
427  PGPLOT moment maps). Karma does not do this perfectly, so the lines
428  may not line up exactly with the pixel borders, so the option
429  remains to keep using the circles. This is controlled by the
430  parameter "annotationType", with possible options being "borders"
431  (the default) or "circles".
432
433* There is a new function getMetadata() that loads the header and WCS
434  data, but no pixel information. This is only of interest if you are
435  doing code development with the Duchamp library -- it does not
436  affect the running of Duchamp itself.
437
438Duchamp version 1.1.4 (2008/02/15)
439----------------------------------
440
441Most of the changes incorporated in this update result from ASKAP code
442development (that makes use of some of the Duchamp functionality),
443but do not actually affect the way Duchamp runs (other than, in a
444couple of cases, making it a bit faster). Changes that are
445relevant for regular users of Duchamp are as follows:
446
447* A new option has been made available (thanks to Mary Putman et al
448  for the suggestion!) to save the spectra of all detected objects in
449  a text file. This has the form of one column for the spectral
450  coordinates and one column of fluxes for each object. This is
451  enabled by the input parameters flagTextSpectra and spectraTextFile.
452
453* Slight changes to the output include he formatting of the way the
454  detected objects are written to the log file. This meant the
455  verification files were also updated. Also the cube statistics are
456  not printed to the results file if a user threshold is specified (as
457  they are not calculated!).
458
459* The determination of beam size has been made more reliable, as has
460  the BUNIT determination.
461
462* Fixed a bug that meant source merging was not done for 2D images
463  (not usually a problem, as the source-finding takes care of this,
464  but came up in parallelisation development).
465
466Duchamp version 1.1.3 (2008/01/08)
467----------------------------------
468
469A minor update that just improves the build process. The location of
470the wcslib include files was not specified correctly, so that some
471machines were unable to find them. The configure script has been fixed
472so that the compilation should work in all cases.
473
474Some minor changes have also been made to the code in the PixelMap
475directory, and to param.cc, to fix warnings or errors that may appear
476in compilation.
477
478However, there are no changes to the actual workings of the code in
479this minor version, so if you have a working version of Duchamp 1.1.2
480there is probably no reason to update.
481
482Duchamp version 1.1.2 (2007/12/07)
483----------------------------------
484
485Compilation:
486
487* The compilation had problems working correctly when the cfitsio and
488  wcs libraries were not in standard locations. The configure script
489  has been tweaked to make sure the libraries are found.
490
491* Problems with compiling in the absence of pgplot have been fixed,
492  and it should now compile fine.
493
494* Improved the configure script for use with Mac OS X and gfortran.
495
496
497Bugfixing:
498
499* A major problem with the text-based output was fixed. The widths of
500  the columns were not being calculated correctly, and were running
501  together. This should no longer be the case.
502
503* There was a bug in the way Duchamp interpreted spectral axes,
504  particularly AIPS types such as FELO-HEL, leading to incorrect
505  scaling of the velocity axis. This has been fixed, so that
506  non-standard types are now dealt with appropriately and the velocity
507  scaling should be accurate.
508
509* Another bug meant the beam correction was always applied to the
510  integrated spectra, regardless of whether the flux units involved
511  the beam (e.g. Jy/beam). This has been fixed. Note that the values
512  of the integrated flux presented in the results table were always
513  calculated correctly.
514
515* Other minor changes to improve the speed and efficiency, especially
516  of the merging code.
517
518New user parameters:
519
520* There is now the possibility to save a FITS file that contains a
521  mask array, indicating where the detected objects are. This is
522  governed by the flagOutputMask parameter.
523
524* The header information that is printed at the start of the results
525  file -- that is, the list of parameters, the statistics of the cube,
526  and the number of detections -- can now be written to a separate
527  file. Set the flagSeparateHeader parameter to true or 1 and it will
528  go to the file indicated by the headerFile parameter (the default is
529  duchamp-Results.hdr).
530
531* A "scaleMax" parameter has been added, so that the wavelet
532  reconstruction can include only a specified range of scales (for
533  instance, if one wants to search just for narrow features such as
534  absorption lines).
535
536* A "flagRobustStats" parameter has been added. This allows the user
537  to elect to use robust statistics (median and median absolute
538  deviation from the median) to estimate the noise parameters. If set
539  to false, the mean and standard deviation will be used. The default
540  value is true.
541
542New Feature:
543
544* When Duchamp is run on a 2D image (i.e. with no spectral output), it
545  now produces a postscript file that shows information each
546  individual source plus the image cutout of the source. This is
547  similar to the spectral output file, but without the spectra. The
548  filename is given by the spectraFile parameter.
549
550* Ability to save a FITS file containing a mask array, with pixel
551  values of 1 for pixels in a detected object, and 0 elsewhere.
552
553
554Duchamp version 1.1.1 (2007/07/20)
555------------------------------------
556
557Minor update to the release, with just a few changes:
558
559* The verification script was generating diffs due to differences in
560  the precision of some calculations when done on different machines.
561  One of these was the integrated flux, and this has been corrected so
562  that the same value should appear on all machines.
563  The verification script has also changed so that just the number of
564  sources and their positions are tested, as well as the
565  logfiles. This should avoid the reporting of spurious differences.
566
567* The grey-scale used in the image cutouts (in the spectral plots) has
568  been inverted. This makes it consistent with the scale used in the
569  maps, and hopefully easier to see when printing.
570
571* The configure/make system has been altered to make it easier to
572  install, and to specify different external libraries. In particular,
573  it is now not necessary to have PGPLOT installed on your system to
574  run Duchamp. In the absence of PGPLOT, Duchamp will run as normal,
575  just without any graphical output. Some source code needed to be
576  restructured to make this work. Please read the README file, or the
577  Installation appendix in the User's Guide, for complete details.
578
579* The time of completion is now written to the log file, so that the
580  user can have some idea of how long the program took.
581
582
583Duchamp version 1.1 (2007/05/17)
584------------------------------------
585
586Changes made since the last numbered release:
587
588EFFICIENCY OF EXECUTION:
589
590* Major change to the way detections are stored. They are now recorded
591  via run-length encoding in the x-y plane, and stored as collections
592  of channel-maps. This improves the memory usage and the speed of
593  execution (particularly for routines such as the merging
594  routines). The memory usage has also been improved by changing the
595  way the list of detected objects is stored.
596
597SMOOTHING:
598
599* Addition of ability to spatially smooth the cube before
600  searching. This is done with a Gaussian kernel, the size and shape
601  of which can be specified by the user, using the parameters kernMaj
602  & kernMin (which are the FWHM for the major & minor axes -- if
603  kernMin is not given it is assumed to match kernMaj) and kernPA (the
604  position angle of the major axis).  There is a new parameter
605  smoothType that distinguishes this method from the spectral (Hanning)
606  smoothing already in use.
607
608DETECTIONS:
609
610* Changed the way detection is done -- now only search in 2D images,
611  keeping all detections (ie. no minimum-pixel requirement). This
612  should be the same as doing both the 1D and 2D searches with the
613  minimum pixel requirement in, but simpler. The rejection is done at
614  the end after all the merging and growing has been done. This leads
615  to a larger number of intermediate detections (ie.  the number
616  before merging), which may increase the run-time slightly, although
617  this is offset by the changes to the efficiency (see above).
618
619* Increased the range over which objects can be grown to match the
620  threshSpatial & threshVelocity parameters, as well as rejecting new
621  pixels based on the BLANK and MW tests.
622
623INPUTS:
624
625* There has been a subtle change in the way BLANK pixels are dealt
626  with. To enable trimming of BLANK pixels, users should use the new
627  parameter flagTrim. The parameters flagBlankPix and blankPixVal are
628  no longer accessible via the parameter file -- warning messages are
629  given if they are provided in the parameter file.
630
631* Added ability to specify a statsec, so that the statistics are only
632  calculated from a given subsection of the cube, rather than the full
633  cube.
634
635* The subsections can also specify the ability to remove a border of n
636  pixels from the edges of an axis (ie. n from the start and from the
637  end) -- as requested in Trac ticket #5.
638
639* Changed the default value of the reconDim parameter from 3 to 1, and
640  the default value of the flagATrous parameter to false.
641
642OUTPUTS:
643
644* The output now includes three different estimates of the "centre" of
645  the detection: peak location, centroid (flux-weighted), or average.
646
647* Some slight improvements to the user feedback during execution.
648
649* Spectral output now includes the baseline, if one was fitted. The
650  format of the plot headers is slightly changed, to stop information
651  falling off the edge of the page.
652
653* Added command-line option -x to directly disable the PGPLOT X-window
654  map plotting. This overrides the setting of flagXOutput in the
655  parameter file.
656
657* Fallback spectral units (in case the FITS header fails to record
658  them) changed to SPC, but code has been fixed so that any problem
659  should be caught before this becomes an issue.
660
661BUGFIXES:
662
663* Fixed bug (Trac ticket #4) that meant the velocity units were not
664  correctly dealt with. Duchamp should be more robust for different
665  velocity axis setups now.
666
667* Fixed bug (ticket #9) with the VOTable output, where the tags were
668  not closing.
669
670* Fixed a bug that meant the integrated fluxes were not calculated
671  properly -- no allowance was made for the number of spatial
672  pixels. This should also work properly for 2D images now as well.
673
674* Fixed minor bug in calculating the flux threshold from the p-value
675  threshold when the FDR method is used. This did not affect the
676  actual thresholding, merely the quoted flux threshold in the results
677  file. Also, the MW channels are kept out of the p-value threshold
678  determination if they are being flagged.
679
680
681
682Duchamp version 1.0.7 (2006/11/22)
683----------------------------------
684
685One new feature, and some improvements and bug-fixes.
686
687* The user can now elect to Hanning-smooth the spectral direction of
688  the cube before the searching is done. This can be done instead of the
689  wavelet reconstruction (although if both are selected, the
690  reconstruction takes precendence). This functionality is switched on
691  and off by the flagSmooth parameter, and the width of the Hanning
692  kernel is governed by the hanningWidth parameter.
693
694* The smoothed array can also be written to a FITS file and read in at
695  the start in the same manner as the reconstructed array.
696
697* Several improvements have been made to the memory
698  management. Several memory leaks were fixed, and the memory usage of
699  Duchamp is considerably less, which will be a help for running it on
700  large cubes. The speed of some routines has also been improved, by
701  removing unnecessarily repetitive loops.
702
703* The sorting routines have been changed, and should now be slightly quicker
704  (and a bit more robust).
705
706* Enabled the scale bar (plotted on the 0th moment map in the spectral
707  output file) to be able to deal with much finer spatial scales (as
708  may be expected from VLBI data).
709
710* Other minor changes to code and presentation.
711
712
713Duchamp version 1.0.6 (2006/11/01)
714----------------------------------
715
716Some incremental improvements and changes to the code:
717
718* The statistics used for the detection are now calculated once for
719  the entire cube, rather than being calculated separately for each
720  channel map and spectrum. This results in a uniform threshold value
721  across the entire cube. The way the statistics calculations are
722  implemented in the code was changed, using a new statistics class.
723
724* This means we can report a peak signal-to-noise value for each
725  detection. This is given in the text-based output, as well as in the
726  summary information above the spectral output for each source.
727
728* The user can now elect not to have the moment map displayed in a
729  PGPlot window, through the use of the new flagXOutput
730  parameter. This should help in cases of running Duchamp on a dumb
731  terminal (with no X-display capabilities), or as part of a batch
732  script where the continual popping-up of the PGPlot window might
733  become annoying.
734
735* There are different Flags reported for the case of an object lying on
736  the spatial edge and spectral edge of the cube (E and S respectively).
737
738* A few minor bug fixes:
739  - When providing a subsection, any axes with the range given by *
740    had the pixel values offset incorrectly. This has been fixed.
741  - Negative searches now correctly invert the reconstructed array
742    when it is read in from a file.
743
744* Other minor changes to the code, to improve memory handling and
745  remove redundant arrays and variables.
746
747
748Duchamp version 1.0.5 (2006/09/06)
749----------------------------------
750
751Since version 1.0, there have been a range of mostly minor
752changes. These are generally bug-fixes, thanks to feedback from a
753number of users, as well as a few extra features.
754
755Here is a summary of the changes since version 1.0:
756
757USER INTERFACE:
758
759* The user is now able to enter the value of flag parameters in the
760  parameter file as strings, as well as integers (so one can enter
761  true or 1 to give the same result).
762
763GRAPHICAL OUTPUT:
764
765* Added a new function that draws the edge of the blank region on the
766  maps and image cutouts. There is a new flag parameter --
767  drawBlankEdges -- that controls the use of this function (the
768  default is true).
769  Also, the edge of the field is plotted on the image cutouts as a
770  yellow line. This distinguishes it from the purple blank pixel
771  dividing line.
772
773* The size of the tick mark in the image cutout (indicating the
774  spatial scale of the image) is now adaptable, so that it shows the
775  scale that best fits the image (ranging from 1 arcsec to 15
776  degrees). (This is a change from the previous standard length of 15
777  arcmin.)
778
779* The zoomed spectrum had its flux scale determined by all points in
780  the zoom box,including those flagged by the Milky Way (MW)
781  range. This has been fixed so that any MW channels will not affect
782  the flux scaling, potentially improving the appearance of objects
783  detected close in velocity to strong MW emission or absorption.
784
785* Improved Karma Annotation file output, so that files without good
786  WCS are dealt with appropriately.
787
788TEXT-BASED OUTPUT:
789
790* The position resolution in the IAU-format names has been increased,
791  so that distinct objects close to one another are more readily
792  distinguished.  Overlapping sources at different velocities may
793  still have the same name, but this is a more general problem.
794
795* The presentation of the results in tabular format has been improved,
796  so that the precision of faint sources is sufficient to show their
797  flux, for instance, is not 0. This also applies to the information
798  presented above the spectral plots.
799
800* Improved error and warning reporting, so that the formatting and
801  presentation of information is clearer.
802
803FITS I/O RELATED:
804
805* The previous version was did not deal well with 4 (or greater)
806  dimensions in the FITS file -- the memory allocation was badly done,
807  and the axes needed to be in a particular order. This has been
808  fixed, so that the FITS I/O routines can now handle any sized FITS
809  file, with axes in any order (as long as there are two spatial and one
810  spectral axes).
811
812* When the FITS file does not have a rest frequency defined, there is
813  no way to transform the frequency axis into velocity. In this case,
814  the spectral axis is left as frequency, and put into units of MHz.
815
816* If the beam size is not indicated by the FITS header (through the
817  BMAJ and BMIN keywords), the user can manually specify the size
818  through the parameter file (using parameter beamSize).
819
820* The FITS I/O routines make use of the command fits_file_exists. This
821  was introduced into the CFITSIO package from version 2.5, so Duchamp
822  will only work with this version or higher. Version 3+ is preferred.
823
824OTHER BUG-FIXING:
825
826* Several bugs related to the blank-pixels were dealt with.
827  The correct values were not propagating through correctly, meaning
828  that the default values were being used. Also, there was the
829  potential for blank pixels to be detected when the FDR method was
830  used. Finally, the image cutout displays occasionally did not
831  obscure the blank pixels. All these problems should be fixed now.
832
833* The FDR setup routine was occasionally failing with a segmentation
834  fault, due to it accessing unallocated memory. This has been fixed.
835
836* Fixed bugs that affected the way 2D images (rather than 3D cubes)
837  were dealt with. The minChannels test failed when minChannels=0.
838
839* If there is no beam information in the FITS header, the user can now
840  enter a beam size as a parameter.
841
842* Other minor fixes to the code, to improve its structure and
843  robustness.
844
845
846Duchamp version 1.0 (2006/06/30)
847--------------------------------
848
849The first full release version.
850
851Several major changes compared to previous version:
852
853* Incorporated a FitsHeader class, to keep track of header information
854  (including WCS) from the FITS file. All units-related calculations
855  are done with this class, such as conversion to velocity, and
856  pixel-to-WCS conversion.  The main advantage of this is improved
857  speed of execution, more adaptable to different units, and improved
858  code (easier for me!).
859
860* Able to select the dimensionality of the reconstruction, rather than
861  just doing it in 3-D.
862
863* Robust text output, so that the columns are sized correctly given
864  the data being written, and the relevant units (derived from the
865  FITS header) are included in the output table.
866
867* Improved the way the reconstructed image is saved and read back in,
868  with a better naming scheme and a better set of new FITS header
869  keywords. The MW headers are now not written.
870
871Other, more minor changes include:
872
873* MW channels now not set to 0, but just ignored for searching
874  purposes (and for the scaling of the spectral output -- they are
875  plotted though and highlighted with a hashed box).
876
877* The scale bar in the moment map in the spectral output file has its
878  length indicated.
879
880* Improved VOTable output, with more information about the way Duchamp
881  was run.
882
883* Made sure all statistics calculations in the reconstruction are
884  based on robust (ie. median) methods.
885
886Also moved to an autoconf based configure/make compilation, for ease of use.
887
888
889Duchamp version 0.9.2 (2006/06/27)
890--------------------------------
891
892* Added the use of warning flags for detections: for either edge
893  location or negative enclosed flux.
894
895* A new command line option added so that the user can specify a FITS
896  file to be searched with the default parameters, rather than giving
897  a full parameter file.
898
899* The scale bar on the moment cutout now works in general case, using
900  an iterative process to get to the correct length.
901
902* RA axes are now done correctly on the full-scale maps.
903
904* Various coding fixes, improving the readability of the code,
905  particularly regarding the declaration of temporary variables.
906
907* Changed the way the time of execution is called : now using time.h
908  functions, rather than a system call.
909
910* Changed output in Detection/outputDetection.cc for the pixel
911  information of detected objects (the info printed above the spectral
912  plots) -- now print out number of voxels in object, and have
913  improved the formatting a little.
914
915* Improved the functionality of saving the FITS file containing the
916  reconstructed array. Added ability to save and read back in the MW
917  parameters when saving a reconstructed cube (if a reconstructed cube
918  has different MW range to that being considered, it would cause
919  problems). ReadRecon now just returns a FAILURE and will reconstruct
920  the cube anew.
921
922* Changed default value of flagGrowth to 0.
923
924
925
926Duchamp version 0.9 (2006/05/05)
927--------------------------------
928
929First public release version.
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