DIC with extremely large images

[BenP123]

Hi, I was wondering if you had any tips for running DIC on DICe with extremely large images. Our composite images collected in the SEM are typically between 500 MB - 1 GB in size and we're struggling to find an DIC solution for images this large.

Is there any technical limitation within DICe that would prevent them from running? And if you can think of any suggestion to run these analyses as efficiently as possible, we'd really appreciate any input! I'm happy to share a set of test images if that helps.

Best wishes,
Ben

[dicengine]

Hey Ben,

We've done images (in NetCDF format) much larger than that in DICe, but it took a while to process. Depending on the RAM of the machine that you are running on, there aren't any limitations in DICe that should stop you from being able to process large images.

At one point, the parallel processing aspects of DICe were in much better shape, but they have been neglected for the past few years. When those features were more operational, the user could split the image among processors. If there is a strong interest in processing extremely large images, it would be a good motivation to shore up the parallel processing aspects of DICe.

[BenP123]

Thanks for the speedy reply! Ok, thanks. I'll give it a go with one of our larger machines.

I think there'd be appetite for that exact thing from the SEM-DIC community, especially now in-situ SEM-DIC testing is much more widespread. We're often dealing with large images in our experiments and have struggled, with various commercial DIC packages not really cutting it.

Cheers,
Ben

[dicengine]

If you have a chance to capture some of the features you think would be helpful in the form of a wishlist, that would be great to help drive development