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Pixcavator web app

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Q. “I was wondering if it is possible to make it as an online service where people could log on to the server and upload their image and obtain the report or csv file.”

A. I have been thinking about a web app for Pixcavator for a while. The idea is certainly very attractive but there are some drawbacks.

First, the computations that Pixcavator does are quite CPU and memory intensive. The testing that has been done shows that online computation (short of some kind of supercomputer) wouldn’t be any faster than if it is done on a modern PC.

Second, uploading a 1000×1000 bmp file can take as long as the processing itself. Uploading PNG and JPEG is certainly much faster, but bio/med researchers are often concerned about analyzing the original images. Most likely, if someone comes with a bmp or tiff file and sees that it can’t be analyzed, he would simply walk away. I certainly wouldn’t try to force them to convert everything to png. A partial solution could be to have it done automatically before uploading but that would be more like a hybrid then a pure web app.

Once it becomes common for people to keep their images (and I mean business/research images, not family albums) “in the cloud”, a web application will make more sense. Getting there may take some time but there is no doubt in my mind that this is the future.