The Software

Project IRENE software and audio processing:

The Project IRENE team has developed innovative software for scanning and processing audio. Dr. Earl Cornell, a Software Engineer in the Engineering Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been the lead developer of IRENE software from since 2006. Working with other phycisists, audio engineers and UC Berkeley and visiting STEM students, three software packages have been developed that can be modified to fit the needs of each unique media type.

The IRENE scanning and data collection software has been developed using LabView. Images from the scans are then processed in application specific packages. The original image to audio conversion packages, RENE (for 2D images) and PRISM (for 3D images) have evolved into a unified package referred to as Weaver. Weaver utilizes a plug-in structure which grants the user significant flexibility. For example, a user can analyze an image set interactively, and reprocess substeps an arbitray number of times. On the other hand, once a processing sequence and parameters have been chosen, the code readily processes image sets in an efficient and robust way. High througput has been achieved for large scanning campaigns. Weaver has thus been customized to take the needs of libraries and museums into account, allowing for the abiltity to include metadata with the audio files being produced. Depending on the needs of the collection, the audio files produced are .wav files, which can easily be transferred to any standard audio engineering software such as SoundForge, RX or Audacity for further EQ and processing.

Both the LabView acquistion package, and Weaver, include a variety of parameters which can be tuned and optimized for the requirements of particular carries and formats. The LabView outputs, in the form of standard TIFF files, are accompanied by a variety of log files to track key aspects of the data as collected.

List of output files produced from LabView Scan:

• data.tif
• data.csv
• data.pri.dat
• data.ue.tif
• data.jpg (Label or object image)
• data.png (Screenshot of scan)
• data.xml (metadata regarding scan)

List of output files produced from Weaver:

• data.wav
• data.mp3 for access copies
• data.xml or data.txt (metadata regarding processing)