Display time series as GIFs or image sequences?

[tlnagy]

JuliaImages/Images.jl#554 made me think that it might be nice to show time series data as GIFs or as a horizontal sequence (show a couple frames then an ellipsis). Currently master simply shows like this

Gray Images.Image with:
  data: 2048×2044×2 Array{ColorTypes.Gray{FixedPointNumbers.UFixed{UInt16,16}},3}
  properties:
    timedim: 3
    colorspace: Gray
    imagedescription: <suppressed>
    spatialorder:  x y
    pixelspacing:  1 1

Maybe this is a bad idea and the text output is better. Thought I would put it out there anyway.

[johnnychen94]

To expand it into a horizontal sequence, now mosaicview works nicely when there aren't so many samples. Ref: JuliaImages/ImageCore.jl#127

[timholy]

We could also add a special method Base.show(io::IO, mime::MIME"image/png", img::AbstractArray{C,3}) to ImageShow.jl, using the GIF-writing functionality of ImageMagick. save(io, img; fps=10) or something. But not sure how you pass a GIF file to Jupyter for display.

[tlnagy]

What if the behavior depended on whether the 3rd dimension is a time dimension, as specified by AxisArrays? GIF output makes the most sense to loop over a time axis (maybe Z) while mosaicview could handle all other cases (channel, position, sample, etc).

[johnnychen94]

We could leave it to users whether they want 3d array shown as a gif. These are the minimal codes that work on Atom.

struct AnimatedGif{T<:AbstractArray{<:Colorant}}
    data::T
end
Base.showable(::MIME"image/gif", agif::AnimatedGif) = true
function Base.show(io::IO, ::MIME"image/gif", agif::AnimatedGif)
    FileIO.save(FileIO.Stream(format"GIF", io), img.data)
end

show_gif(img) = AnimatedGif(img)

I'm transferring this issue to ImageShow.

[timholy]

Even a non-temporal image sometimes makes sense as a looping image. For example if you're showing a 3d stack of microscopy images, for me it's easier to mentally assemble the structure if the changes occur "in place" rather than me having to determine corresponding points across mosaic tiles. But this may be a matter of personal preference.

[johnnychen94]

Please try out the play/explore/gif functions in ImageShow 0.3 🚀