Frequently Asked Questions

How do I install mahotas with anaconda?

If you are using conda, you can install mahotas from conda-forge using the following commands:

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda install mahotas

Who uses mahotas?

In June 2016, there were 34 papers citing the mahotas paper

Why did you not simply contribute to scipy.ndimage or scikits.image?

When I started this project (although it wasn’t called mahotas and it was more of a collection of semi-organised routines than a project), there was no scikits.image.

In the meanwhile, all these projects have very different internal philosophies. ndimage is old-school scipy, in C, with macros. scikits.image uses Cython extensively, while mahotas uses C++ and templates. I don’t want to use Cython as I find that it is not yet established enough and at the time it could not be used to write functions that run on multiple types (like with C++ templates). The scipy community does not want to use C++.

I have, on the other hand, taken code from ndimage and ported it to C++ for use in mahotas. In the process, I feel it is much cleaner code (because you can use RAII, exceptions, and templates) and I want to keep it that way.

In any case, we all use the same data format: numpy arrays. It is very easy (trivial, really) to use all the packages together and take whatever functions you want from each. All the packages use function based interfaces which make it easy to mix-and-match.

I ran out of memory computing Haralick features on 16 bit images. Is it not supported?

Yes, it is supported, but your machine may not be big enough to do the computation. In order to compute Haralick features, first a cooccurrence matrix is computed. This matrix has the size (ngrey, ngrey) where ngrey is the largest grey value in the input. Thus, if your image has a very high dynamic range (i.e., ngrey is large), you may not have the resources to compute the cooccurrence matrix.

It is often a good idea to contrast stretch your images. For example, using the following code, stretches your images to the 0-255 range:

im_stretched = mh.stretch(im)
features = mh.features.haralic(im_stretched)

16 bit images where the dynamic range is not too large (for example, some imaging equipment can only really produce 12 bits, so ngrey < 4096) are not a problem.

What are the parameters to Local Binary Patterns?

Read the documentation on local binary patterns.

I am using mahotas in a scientific publication, is there a citation?

If you use mahotas in a scientific publication, please cite:

Coelho, L.P. 2013. Mahotas: Open source software for scriptable computer vision. Journal of Open Research Software 1(1), DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jors.ac

In BibTeX format:

@article{coelho:mahotas,
    title = {Mahotas: Open source software for scriptable computer vision},
    author = {Luis Pedro Coelho},
    journal = {Journal of Open Research Software},
    year = {2013},
    volume = {1},
    doi = {10.5334/jors.ac},
    url = {https://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jors.ac}
}

This is accessible in Python using mahotas.citation().

Imread cannot find FreeImage

Mahotas itself does not have the functionality to read in images (see the I/O section.

Functions such as imread are just a wrapper around one of 2 backends:

  1. mahotas-imread (i.e., https://pypi.python.org/pypi/imread)

  2. FreeImage

Thus, you need to install one of the packages above. At one point, mahotas supported wrapping matplotlib, but their image loading methods are unreliable as it uses other packages itself. Thus, depending on what you had installed, the resulting images would be different.

If you are running on Windows, you may wish to try Christoph Gohlke’s packages.