projectile 0.0.4

A tile-on-demand tile server built with PIL and Tornado

projectile
==========

A tile-on-demand tile server built with PIL and Tornado.

Motivation
----------

We want to store a high-resolution image in memory on the server as a numpy
array. Then when a client requests a particular tile, we can make the PNG of the
requested tile by slicing the numpy array and using PIL to write the resulting
PNG back to the client through a StringIO stream.

This is primarily intended for building interactive visualizations in research
settings where we might want to skip the time- and/or disk-intensive tile
generation step required by typical tile servers.

Demo
----

Install projectile

$ pip install projectile

Serve a test image from the [USC-SIPI Image Database](http://sipi.usc.edu/database/):

$ projectile sanfran

Manually request a particular tile by navigating to <http://localhost:8000/2/1/2.png>.

Try zooming and panning in the demo client by navigating to <http://localhost:8000/>.

Serve one of your own images (any format readable by PIL) with

$ projectile some_image.tiff

or, if you have data in a numpy `.npy` file,

$ projectile some_image.npy

Load an image in grayscale mode and apply a colormap:

$ projectile --mode L --cmap viridis pentagon

Stress testing
--------------

To test the performance limits of on-demand tiling, download this
[high resolution map of Great Britain](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_new_map_of_Great_Britain_according_to_the_newest_and_most_exact_observations_(8342715024).jpg)
(8,150 × 13,086 pixels, file size: 102.74 MB) from Wikimedia Commons.

Grayscale performance test:

$ projectile britain.jpg -m L

Reducing tile resolution when running in color:

$ projectile britain.jpg --tile_size 128

Dependencies
------------

- `numpy>=1.13.3`
- `Pillow>=4.3.0`
- `tornado>=4.5.2`
- `matplotlib>=2.1.0`

API
---

### URL scheme

The server will serve grayscale and RGB images in their original colors at

/<z>/<x>/<y>/<s>.png

where `<z>` is the zoom level, `<x>` and `<y>` specify the coordinates of the
tile at that zoom level (`0/0` is the top left tile), and `<s>` specifies the
image tile resolution in pixels (must be a power of 2).

The server will serve colormapped versions of a grayscale image at

/<z>/<x>/<y>/<s>/<cmap>/<vmin>/<vmax>.png

where `<cmap>` is the name of a matplotlib colormap, and `<vmin>` and `<vmax>`
specify the range of image pixel values linearly interpolate against the
colormap (pixel values outside this range will be clipped).

### Using a custom client

If you like the projectile backend but just want to use a simple custom client
contained in a single HTML file `custom_client.html`, you can run

$ projectile array.npy --client custom_client.html

to make projectile serve your client instead of the included demo client.

### Using projectile in your existing Tornado web application

The core functionality is exposed in the `TileHandler` class defined in
[server.py](projectile/server.py), which you can use in your own Tornado web
applications:

```python
from tornado import web
from projectile.server import TileHandler

...

app = web.Application([
(r'/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+).png', TileHandler,
dict(array=array)),
...
])

...
```

### Launching projectile from your own Python code

You can also launch a server from your own Python code with the `run()` function
defined in [server.py](projectile/server.py):

```python
from projectile.server import run

run(array)
```

Credits
-------

The demo client is lifted from <http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/5914438>, with the
addition of a small filtering check to prevent the client from requesting tiles
which lie beyond the image boundaries.