CIMES-FISHEYE is a package of free programs for the analysis of hemispherical photographs of forest canopies, to extract key canopy attributes like leaf area index, canopy openness, iPAR, etc. These programs offer a set of unique features for film and digital hemispherical photography:
Programs are written in C and C++ languages, ensuring portability over any computing system: Windows, Mac OS X (Intel-based, Power PC G4 and G5), UNIX and LINUX (source code available on request). CIMES-FISHEYE is not a self-contained software based on a graphical user interface (GUI). Therefore, before running the programs, graphical preprocessing is needed, using commercial or free graphical software.
CIMES-FISHEYE consists of command-line programs, which run independently of each other. They stemmed from an early UNIX environment (1982) and were progressively adapted to other environments (Windows, Mac OS X), regularly improved and updated (2008).
A companion manual introduces to hemispherical photography of forest canopies, from film or digital cameras, providing theoretical background and a practical user’s guide. Numerous references accompany the manual.
These command-line programs are stand-alone. They can be extracted from the archives. GFA is the core program. It extracts gap fraction and gap size data from digital (or digitized) images in BMP format. All other programs use gap fraction data and/or gap size data created by GFA.
The manual is composed of two parts: (I) Theory, (II) User's guide and programs documentation. <readme.pdf> explains how to install and use the programs.