User Interface

The VISTA user interface is designed for efficient navigation and analysis of multi-frame imagery datasets.

Main Window Layout

The VISTA main window consists of several key areas:

Note

A screenshot of the VISTA Main Window will be added here in a future update.

Components

1. Menu Bar: Access to file operations, algorithms, tools, and settings

2. Toolbar: Quick access to common operations

3. Imagery Viewer: Central display area for viewing imagery

4. Data Panels: Tabbed panels for managing data (Imagery, Detections, Tracks, etc.)

5. Playback Controls: Frame navigation and playback controls

6. Status Bar: Current frame, mouse coordinates, and pixel values

Imagery Viewer

The central imagery viewer displays the current frame with overlays for detections, tracks, and other annotations.

Navigation

• Pan: Click and drag with left mouse button

• Zoom: Mouse wheel or zoom controls

• Reset View: Right-click the viewer and select View All

Display Controls

• Contrast/Brightness: Adjust using the histogram widget

• Color Maps: Apply different color maps for visualization

• Overlays: Toggle detection and track overlays

• Annotations: Add markers, lines, and regions

Data Panels

Imagery Panel

Manage loaded imagery datasets:

• Load new imagery files

• View imagery metadata

• Select active imagery

• Apply treatments (bias, NUC, etc.)

• Save processed imagery

Detections Panel

View and manage detections:

• Run detection algorithms

• View detection parameters

• Filter detections by properties

• Export detection data

• Visualize detection statistics

Tracks Panel

Work with object tracks:

• Run tracking algorithms

• View track properties

• Edit tracks manually

• Interpolate missing detections

• Export track data

AOIs Panel

Define and manage Areas of Interest:

• Create rectangular or polygon AOIs

• Associate AOIs with frames

• Extract sub-imagery from AOIs

• Save and load AOI definitions

Sensors Panel

Manage sensor calibration data:

• Load sensor metadata

• View sensor parameters

• Associate sensors with imagery

• Configure coordinate transformations

Features Panel

Work with features and annotations:

• Create point, line, and polygon features

• Associate features with frames

• Add properties and labels

• Export feature data

Playback Controls

The playback controls allow navigation through multi-frame imagery:

Controls

• Play/Pause: Start/stop playback

• Step Forward/Backward: Move one frame

• Frame Slider: Scrub through frames

• Frame Rate Control: Adjust playback speed

• Loop Toggle: Enable/disable loop playback

Keyboard Shortcuts

• Space: Play/Pause

• Left/Right Arrow: Previous/Next frame

• Page Up/Down: Skip forward/backward by 10 frames

Menus

File Menu

• Load Imagery (HDF5): Load imagery from an HDF5 file (.h5 or .hdf5)

• Load Detections (CSV): Load detections from a CSV file

• Load Tracks (CSV): Load tracks from a CSV file

• Load AOIs (CSV): Load areas of interest from a CSV file

• Load Shapefiles: Load shapefile overlays (.shp)

• Load Placemarks (CSV): Load placemark features from a CSV file

• Simulate: Generate synthetic imagery, detections, and tracks using the built-in simulator

• Save Imagery (HDF5): Save the selected imagery to an HDF5 file in version 1.7 format

• Clear Overlays: Remove all loaded detections, tracks, AOIs, and features from the viewer

• Settings: Open the application settings dialog

• Exit: Close the application

View Menu

• Data Manager: Toggle visibility of the Data Manager dock panel

• Point Selection Mode: Toggle point selection mode for picking pixel coordinates

• Histogram: Toggle the histogram widget in the imagery viewer

• Map View: Toggle the WMS map view background (requires a sensor with geolocation data)

• Labels: Open the label manager to create and manage labels for tracks and detections

Image Processing Menu

• Subset Frames: Crop imagery to a subset of frames

• Background Removal

  • Temporal Median: Subtract temporal median of surrounding frames

  • Robust PCA: Separate low-rank background from sparse foreground

  • Sliding Subspace: Sliding-window low-rank SVD background estimation

  • GoDec: Go Decomposition via randomized SVD (requires PyTorch)

• Enhancement

  • Coaddition: Improve SNR by averaging multiple frames

• Detectors

  • Simple Threshold: Detect pixels above a fixed threshold

  • CFAR: Constant False Alarm Rate detector

  • PSTNN: Partial Sum of Tensor Nuclear Norm detector

• Tracking

  • Simple Tracker: Nearest-neighbor frame-to-frame association

  • Kalman Filter Tracker: Kalman filter-based multi-object tracker

  • Network Flow Tracker: Min-cost network flow tracking

  • Tracklet Tracker: Tracklet-based association tracker

• Treatment

  • Bias Removal: Subtract dark current using sensor bias frames

  • Non-Uniformity Correction: Apply flat-field correction using sensor gain images

Filters Menu

• Track Filters

  • Track Interpolator: Interpolate missing frames within tracks

  • Savitzky-Golay Filter: Smooth track positions using Savitzky-Golay filtering

Settings

The Settings dialog is accessible via File → Settings and is organized into five tabs.

Imagery

Histogram Computation

Controls how the histogram widget computes its display range.

• Bins (default: 256): Number of bins used when computing histograms. More bins give finer detail but are slower to compute. Range: 8–2048.

• Min Percentile (default: 1.0): Lower percentile bound for the histogram range. Lower values include more dark pixels. Range: 0.0–50.0.

• Max Percentile (default: 99.0): Upper percentile bound for the histogram range. Higher values include more bright pixels. Range: 50.0–100.0.

• Max Row/Col (default: 512): Maximum number of rows or columns sampled for histogram computation. Images larger than this are downsampled for performance. Range: 64–4096.

Hover Tooltips

Controls the appearance of the geolocation and pixel value tooltips that appear when hovering over the imagery viewer.

• Font Color (default: yellow): Color of the tooltip text. Click the color swatch to open a color picker.

• Font Size (default: 12): Font size in points. Range: 6–72.

• Font Weight (default: Normal): Font weight. Options: Thin, Light, Normal, DemiBold, Bold, Black.

Track Visualization

Uncertainty Ellipse

Controls how track uncertainty ellipses are rendered in the viewer.

• Line Style (default: Dash): Line style for uncertainty ellipses. Options: Solid, Dash, Dot, Dash-Dot, Dash-Dot-Dot.

• Line Width (default: 1): Line width in pixels. Range: 1–10.

• Scale Factor (default: 1.0): Multiplier applied to the uncertainty ellipse radii. 1.0 corresponds to 1-sigma (~68% confidence), 2.0 to 2-sigma (~95%), and 3.0 to 3-sigma (~99.7%). Range: 0.1–10.0.

Data Manager

Undo Settings

• Undo Depth (default: 10): Maximum number of undo operations kept in history. Higher values use more memory. Changes take effect immediately. Range: 1–100.

GPU

Configures the GPU device used by PyTorch-accelerated algorithms (e.g., GoDec).

• Device: Select which CUDA GPU to use when multiple devices are available.

Note

This tab requires PyTorch to be installed (pip install vista-imagery[gpu]) and a CUDA-capable GPU to be detected. If either requirement is not met, the tab displays an informational message.

Map View

Tile Servers

Manages the list of tile servers used for the WMS map view background. Click a row to select the active server. Servers can be added, edited, or removed using the buttons below the table. Each server entry specifies a name, a URL template with {z}, {x}, {y} placeholders, and a coordinate system (EPSG:3857 Web Mercator or EPSG:4326 Geographic).

Cache

• Tile Cache Size (default: 256): Maximum number of map tiles kept in memory. Higher values reduce network requests but use more memory. Range: 16–2048.

• Projection Cache Size (default: 64): Maximum number of projected imagery frames cached. Higher values reduce recomputation but use more memory. Range: 8–262144.

Projection

• Use coarse grid sampling (default: enabled): When enabled, the coordinate mapping is computed on a small grid and interpolated to full resolution. This is much faster but slightly approximate. Disable for exact per-pixel projection.

• Coarse Grid Size (default: 64): Maximum dimension of the coarse sampling grid. Higher values are more accurate but slower. Only available when coarse grid sampling is enabled. Range: 8–512.

Status Bar

The status bar displays contextual information:

• Current Frame: Frame number and timestamp

• Mouse Position: Pixel coordinates under cursor

• Pixel Value: Intensity value at cursor position

• Selection Info: Information about selected objects

• Progress: Algorithm execution progress

Customization

The VISTA interface can be customized to suit your workflow:

• Panel Layout: The Data Manager can be docked in different locations

• Themes: Icons adjust to your systems light (purple) / dark (yellow) theme.

Tips and Tricks

• Data Selection: All data is selected by selecting table rows in the Data Manager.

• Multi-Select: Hold Ctrl/Cmd while clicking to select multiple items

• Context Menus: Right-click on items for context-specific options

• Drag and Drop: Drag files from file explorer to load them in their respective panels in the Data Manager