The BigDataViewer is a re-slicing browser for terabyte-sized multi-view image sequences. Conceptually, the visualized data comprises multiple data sources. Each source provides one 3D image (for each time-point in the case of a time-lapse sequence or angle for a multi-angle SPIM dataset).
BigDataViewer comes with a custom data format that is is optimized for fast random access to very large data sets. This permits browsing to any location within a multi-terabyte recording in a fraction of a second. The file format is based on XML and HDF5. Images are represented as tiled multi-resolution pyramids, and stored in HDF5 chunked multi-dimensional arrays with metadata contained in the XML file. BigDataViewer was developed with multi-view light-sheet microscopy data in mind and integrates well with Fiji’s SPIMage processing pipeline.ImgLib2 is a general-purpose, multidimensional image and data processing library.
