VIP - Vortex Image Processing package

Introduction

VIP is a python package for angular, reference star and spectral differential imaging for exoplanet/disk detection through high-contrast imaging. VIP is compatible with Python 2.7 and 3.6.

The goal of VIP is to incorporate open-source, efficient, easy-to-use and well-documented implementations of high-contrast image processing algorithms to the interested scientific community. The main repository of VIP resides on Github, the standard for scientific open source code distribution, using Git as a version control system.

VIP started as the effort of a PhD student within the VORTEX team (Liege, Belgium). It is currently developed by collaborators from several institutes/teams. The tab contributors on VIP's Github repo shows the direct contributions to the code. Most of VIP's functionalities are mature but it doesn't mean it's free from bugs. The code is continuously evolving and therefore feedback/contributions are greatly appreciated. If you want to report a bug, suggest or add a functionality please create an issue or send a pull request on the repository.

Documentation

The documentation for VIP can be found here: http://vip.readthedocs.io.

Jupyter notebook tutorial

A tutorial (Jupyter notebook) showing he use of VIP for ADI data processing is available in this repository. Alternatively, it can be visualized online here. If you are new to the Jupyter notebook application check out the beginner guide.

TL;DR setup guide

$ pip install vip_hci

Installation and dependencies

The benefits of using a Python package manager (distribution), such as Anaconda or Canopy, are many. Mainly, it brings easy and robust package management and avoids messing up with your system's default python. An alternative is to use package managers like apt-get for Ubuntu or Homebrew/MacPorts/Fink for Macos. I personally recommend using Miniconda which you can find here: https://conda.io/miniconda.html.

VIP depends on existing packages from the Python ecosystem, such as numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas, astropy, scikit-learn, scikit-image, photutils and emcee. There are different ways of installing VIP suitable for different scenarios.

Using PIP

The easiest way to install VIP is through the Python Package Index, aka Pypi, with the pip package manager. Simply run:

$ pip install vip_hci

With pip you can easily uninstall, upgrade or install a specific version of VIP. For upgrading the package run:

$ pip install --upgrade vip_hci

Alternatively, you can use pip install and point to the Github repo:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/vortex-exoplanet/VIP.git

Using the setup.py file

You can download VIP from its Github repository as a zip file. A setup.py file (Setuptools) is included in the root folder of VIP. Enter the package's root folder and run:

$ python setup.py install

Using GIT

If you want to benefit from the git functionalities, you need to clone the repository (make sure your system has git installed):

$ git clone https://github.com/vortex-exoplanet/VIP.git

Then you can install the package by following the previous steps, using the setup.py file. Creating a fork with Github is recommended to developers or to users who want to experiment with the code.

Other dependencies

Opencv (Open source Computer Vision) provides fast c++ image processing operations and is used by VIP for basic image transformations. If you don't have/want the opencv python bindings (opencv is optional since VIP v0.5.2), VIP will use the much slower ndimage/scikit-image libraries transparently. Fortunately, installing opencv library is nowadays and easy process that is done automatically with the VIP installation. Alternatively, you could use conda:

$ conda install opencv

VIP ships a stripped-down version of RO.DS9 (by Russell Owen) for convenient xpaset/xpaget based interaction with DS9. VIP contains a class vipDS9 that works on top of RO.DS9 containing several useful methods for DS9 control such as displaying arrays, manipulating regions, controlling the display options, etc. VipDS9 functionality will only be available if you have DS9 and XPA installed on your system PATH.

Also, optionally you can install the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) optimizations provided that you have Anaconda(>v2.5) and conda on your system. This is recommended along with Opencv for maximum speed on VIP computations. Run:

$ conda install mkl

Starting from version 0.8.0 VIP offers the possibility of computing SVDs on GPU by using cupy. This remains an optional requirement, to be installed by the user, as it requires having a real (good) GPU card and a proper CUDA environment.

Loading VIP

Finally, start Python (or IPython or a Jupyter notebook if you prefer) and check that you are able to import VIP:

import vip_hci as vip

If everything went fine with the installation, you will see a welcome message. Now you can start finding exoplanets!

Mailing list

You can subscribe to our mailing list if you want to be informed of the latest developments of the VIP package (new versions and/or updates).

Attribution

Please cite Gomez Gonzalez et al. 2017 (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aa73d7/) whenever you publish data reduced with VIP. Astrophysics Source Code Library reference [ascl:1603.003].