1. Introduction

Chapter summary:
mul is VXL compatible model-based computer vision.

1.1 Manchester

Manchester, despite being better known for its football teams, is the location of the Dept. of Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, at the University of Manchester. The mul library was written by members of the department.

The department specialises (amongst other things) in model based computer vision. This roughly means the designing of statistical models which represent features in those images, means of training these models from real images, and the extracting of information from test images using these models.

1.2 VXL

The mul libraries are build on VXL.

1.3 Documentation

The mul documentation comes in two main forms: this book, and structured comments in the source code, which are automatically extracted. The book is intended to be a single reference, where all the high-level documentation resides.

1.3.1 The mul Book

The book (in subdirectory mul/doc/book) is a human-written collection of VXL documentation, suitable for printing. It is intended to be readable as an introduction to the various facilities provided by the mul libraries, and to be browsable as a first source of examples and tips.

1.3.2 Automatically generated documentation

Although the human-written mul book is the first source, the definitive authority on what a class or function does must be the source code comments. The book will give a high-level description of the most important and commonly-used features of a class, but the source code contains the details. In order to make these details easier to scan, the mul source files contain specially structured comments, which can be scanned by the Doxygen program and converted into an attractive hyperlinked reference.

An example of what the syntax for documentation looks like can be found in vxl/doc/vxl_doc_rules.[h,cxx], but briefly a comment line which begins with //: is documentation for the type, function, or variable which follows it. For example

//: Brief description of my_class
class my_class {
  //: \brief Brief description, the long one is in the .cxx file
  my_class();
};

You can find the doxygen output at The VXL Documentation site.

1.4 The Design and Evolution of mul

Design goals:

• Cross platform
• Flexible -- allow heavy use of strategy patterns
• uniform naming - of course.

Large parts of MUL came from RADIAL a C++ Computer Vision Library developed at Manchester. Tim Cootes and Ian Scott were principally responsible for this conversion and the design of the rest.

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