LIMA: Library for IMage Acquisition a Worldwide Project for 2D Detector Control

Abstract

International audienceThe LIMA project started in 2009. The goal was to provide a software library for the unified control of 2D detectors. LIMA is a collaborative project involving synchrotrons, research facilities and industrial companies. LIMA supports most detectors used for X-ray detection or other scientific applications. Live display is supported via a video interface and most of the native video camera image formats are supported. LIMA provides a plug-in architecture for on-line processing which allows image pre-treatment before saving e.g. noise reduction algorithm or automatic X-ray beam attenuation during continuous scans. The library supports many file format including EDF, CBF, FITS, HDF5 and TIFF. To cope with increasing detector acquisition speed, the latest LIMA release includes multi-threaded, parallelized image saving with data compression (gzip or lz4). For even higher throughput a new design, based on a distributed multi-computer architecture, of the LIMA framework is envisaged. The paper will describe the LIMA roadmap for the coming years