IQM is an image processing application based on IDL. It is developed by Helmut Ahammer, Institute of Biophysics, Center of Physiological Medicine, Medical University of Graz, Austria.
http://www.meduni-graz.at/qmnm/iqm/index.htm

IQM is used by the author mainly for common interactive image processing tasks and for special nonlinear analysis. Objects of digital images, such as cancer spheroids or histological slices of human biopsy probes were treated as fractals and with the help of IQM several fractal dimensions can be calculated.

Single images, image sequences or an image stack can be processed in an interchangeable manner. Image processing settings can be easily adapted to a set of images with an image manager and the final processing for all images can be done without any additional programming steps. Most of the image processing widgets can be opened multiply and therefore they allow a rapid comparison between different image processing settings.

The IQM main window

The "Manager" window allows the user to manage the current image or image stack. Image informations are displayed. Scrolling through the stack or the image sequence is possible. The "Play" and "Stop" buttons control a slide show function with a chosen delay time and the option of indefinitely repeating. The button "Process Stack" starts the processing of all images in the stack with the current settings of the chosen feature.

The "Board" window contains the output log, where actual processing steps, error messages or results of calculations are displayed.

The "Tank" window is a gallery or history of images being processed. If the "Ok" button of a feature or the "Process Stack" button of the Manager is selected, the feature is processed and the new image(s) with the image information is(are) stored in the tank. Left mouse click on a thumbnail pushes the image(s) or the stack in the Look window. Right mouse click erases the image(s) or the stack from the tank.

The current image is displayed in the "Look" window. Image size and grey level informations are displayed in the last line of this window. Left mouse click zooms in the region around the curser by a factor of 2. Right mouse click zooms out by a factor of 2.

The main features are the support of .tif, .jpg, .bmp, .png images, image sequences or .tif stacks, support of 8bit and 16bit grey level images or 24bit RGB color images.

Several image open and save possibilities, clipboard copying and other editing features are implemented. Calling IDL's iImage, iVolume, XRoi and Slicer is implemented. The images can be processed by aligning, background correction, several image calculation possibilities, image conversion, filtering (high,- low- pass), cropping, histogram adjustments, binary and grey value morphology, resizing or stack editing. Image segmentation can be performed by application of k-mean clustering, grey value thresholding, application of RGB relative values or texture features. Texture can be investigated by FFT, FFT filtering, first order and second order image statistics.

Special algorithms for calculations of the fractal dimension are implemented due to the main scientific field of the author. The fractal dimensions can be calculated by the blanket dimension, the generalized correlation dimension, the power spectrum dimension and the Minkowski dimension. A generator of a fractal surface completes the fractal features of IQM.

Furthermore there are some features allowing quantitative measurements such as area, perimeter, formfactor, variance, kurtosis, or skewness. A histogram or a correlation plot can be plotted.

A complete description of the IQM functionality can be found here:
http://www.meduni-graz.at/qmnm/iqm/IQM1ReadMe.pdf