1.1 The software environment

The code used in this handbook is meant to be used in the open source, interactive statistical processing environment commonly known as R, and it is based on two image processing packages: AnImAl, an image algebra, and TeMa, providing extended template matching support. Both packages require additional ones, all of them freely available from the central repository of CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network (http://cran.r-project.org). Detailed information on the functions provided by each package is available within the distributed packages. The following code snippet presents the commands to load the required packages and a couple of supporting functions to generate postscript output to be included in a research report.

This handbook makes use of Sweave functionalities available within the R environment: the textual (latex) source files include special sections of R-code that are automatically executed before creating the final text for the document. Most of the images presented in the book are automatically generated in this way: correctness of reported code and alignment of results is therefore ensured. The special Codelet sections are automatically formatted from annotated code available in the provided packages or in the set of code snippets used to generate the examples of this book.