Rerun as a better alternative to imshow

[nikolausWest]

Rerun should become a valid replacement and obvious improvement to using cv2.imshow, plt.imshow, or px.imshow.

This requires (at least):

• Configurable ranges / (spatial) extent in image and tensor view #1510
• Optionally show grid on image and tensor views
• Optionally show axis on image and tensor views
• Rerun renders inline in Jupyter Notebooks
• Zoomed in value inspection on hover for tensor views
• Images in 2D views are special cases of tensor views
• All image and tensor related blueprint options are settable from the Python and Rust SDKs

[Erol444]

To add to this the list, disabling logging would likely be required as well for runtime applications as well, as otherwise, users would quickly run out of RAM:)

[nikolausWest]

@Erol444: Do you mean just setting the logging SDK to be no-op? That can be done already. See the parameter default_enabled in the init method: https://ref.rerun.io/docs/python/v0.2.0/common/initialization/#rerun.init

[Erol444]

@nikolausWest Is this working as expected, for Python as well? Similar to this issue (& my comments there), it looks like it isn't working, or perhaps there's a memory leak somewhere else. I tried it with default_enabled=False, but it seems like it's still logging:

[teh-cmc]

Can confirm default_enabled is broken in the python bindings at the moment; will push a fix in a moment so that it ships as part of the imminent 0.3.0 release.

In the meantime you can use rr.set_enabled to achieve the same effect, that one still works.

[Erol444]

@teh-cmc but then how do I transfer the image to rr so it displays it? The rr.log_image() doesn't work (I assume as I disabled logging, duh), and rr viewer is just waiting for a connection.

[nikolausWest]

@Erol444: could you give a little more details on what you are trying to achieve? I think I may have originally misinterpreted what you meant by disabling logging.

[Erol444]

Hi @nikolausWest , I just want the live-preview of the image/pointcloud/... without actually saving the history (logging?) by writing these objects into RAM, as otherwise it fills up the whole RAM and slows down. I hope that makes sense!

[nikolausWest]

@Erol444, alright, I understand. We use the name logging for the operation that takes data out of your program and into Rerun (whether that is a .rrd file or the Viewer). That it fills up RAM is based on two separate problems:

• Use less memory #1242
• Memory pruning broken in camera example #1539

We're working on fixing both of these right now.

[nikolausWest]

Not quite a requirement for replacing imshow but this still feels related:

• Multilabel segmentations logging #1544

[nikolausWest]

Superseded by #1630