2.0.0beta2 (2011-12-23)

The most notable new feature in 2.0.0beta2 is a new remote object framework. It allows one to map QObjects directly to URIs in a web server, which makes web browser integration a no-brainer. The remote object framework also provides a completely network-transparent signal/slot mechanism and allows calling remote functions with no "brokers" or "stub compilers" many Corba developers hate deeply. Beta2 comes with a new OCR plug-in and over 200 bug fixes and improvements in performance, stability, and usability.

New features

• Remote object framework
• Property protection levels in PiiOperation
• Thread-safe read/write of properties in PiiDefaultOperation
• OCR plug-in. Handwritten digit recognition implemented.
• An almost complete rewrite of the linear algebra library. New SVD and PCA algorithms.
• Circular Hough transform
• Multi-class boosting and an operation interface to boosting algorithms
• Blocking learning to PiiClassifierOperation
• Solution algorithm to the linear assignment problem
• Platform-neutral microsecond-resolution timer (on Linux/OSX, no Windows support yet)
• Support for template classes in JavaScript API
• JavaScript wrappers to QColor, PiiAbstractSocket
• New "synchronized" construct for easy mutual exclusion.
• Prebuilt MSVC binaries.

Improvements

• Better OpenCV integration, including bug fixes
• Remarkably improved camera driver interface with a few new implementations
• PiiAsyncCall now accepts parameters for asynchronous functions
• Scale invariance to shape context descriptors
• Region-of-interest support to adaptive thresholding
• New composition mode in PiiMatrixComposer
• ... and about 70 other minor changes

Changed functionality

• PiiVariant now uses qint64 as a long integer type.
• PiiDefaultOperation::Simple was renamed "NonThreaded"
• PiiWaitingIODevice no longer exists. The functionality was moved to PiiSocketDevice
• PiiBackgroundExtractor property names and output name
• PiiImageFileWriter::stripPath is now false by default
• Renamed PiiNetworkClient::readTimeout to connectionTimeout

Bug fixes

• PiiOperationCompound::stop() now works in "Starting" state.
• PiiOperationCompound subclasses now work in JavaScript
• Never-ending on-line training in PiiClassifierOperation.
• Potential synchronization error when stopping a configuration with many parallel flows at different flow levels.
• ... and more than 150 others, many of them platform-specific.

2.0.0beta1 (2011-04-30)

New features

• Feature point based object detection framework
• RANSAC algorithm
• k-d tree
• Shape-based matching (shape contexts)
• MSVC support is back. No precompiled binaries though.
• Experimental QML support
• Undistortion operation for camera calibration
• A few new generic low-level algorithms
• An asynchronously loading thumbnail list view
• A program to execute JavaScript/QML directly
• A generic camera image source (PiiCameraOperation)
• Background extractor for detecting moving objects in videos.

Improvements

• Many small optimizations in the execution engine.
• Refactoring and enhancements in the serialization library (e.g. support for non-default constructors)
• Enhanced region-of-interest support. Rectangular areas and free-form ROI masks are now supported by most operations.
• Support for non-rectangular crop areas to PiiImageCropper.
• More preprocessor tricks (loops, conditional macros)
• Many common Qt types were added to the JavaScript API.
• PiiClassifierOperation can now handle also matching applications.
• PiiCameraDriver can now handle different frame buffer allocation schemes.
• Usability enhancements on the documentation site.

Changed functionality

• PiiVariantPtr is removed in favor of the faster (and more convenient) PiiVariant
• PiiSampleSet is now hidden as an implementation detail. Compatible sample set types can be used directly.
• Serialization of binary data changed in the serialization library. This among other things makes previously stored archives incompatible with the current version.

Bug fixes

• Incorrect handling of boundary limits in PiiBoundaryFinderOperation
• Memory allocation error in PiiMatrix::appendColumn()
• Infinite recursion in PiiBinaryMatrixTransform::rowBegin()
• Out-of-bounds index in PiiImage::crop()
• PiiCalibration::undistort() didn't always converge. Replaced with LM minimization.
• Misplaced rectangles in PiiImageOverlay
• Potential crash when removing overlays
• Handling enter in PiiLayerEditor
• A literal corner case in labeling 4-connected components
• Out-of-bounds index in PiiSerializationException
• Missing signal in PiiTableModel::clear()
• PiiDefaultFlowController sometimes missed an incoming object
• Flow controller behavior in PiiPisoOperation
• Initialization error in PiiFrequencyCounter
• Incorrectly retained images in PiiVisualTrainerWidget
• Memory leak in PiiImageFileWriter (Windows specific)
• Handling of precalculated Jacobians in LM minimization
• Handling of multiples of pi in PiiImage::rotate() with different cropping styles.
• Incorrect initialization in PiiSimpleMemoryManager.
• Crash in handling stateless protocols in PiiNetworkServerThread