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An Introduction to the 4Pass System

The Splinescan v4 prototype scanning system will consist of a series of discrete applications and scripts (known as 'filters') that are linked together using scripts to form a pathway. This 'pathway script' orchestrates the production of a 3D model from raw data. This modular approach has several distinct advantages over monolithic applications when dealing with fixed sensor, non-contact scanning applications.

Firstly, the loosely interconnected nature of each application within the scanning pathway makes it simple to interface scripts and applications that have been produced in different languages. No recompilation or transcoding is necessary, which means that any developer can create filters or process modules for the scanning system in their preferred programming language.

General users will benefit from the flexibility afforded by the discrete applications. The open nature of the pathway facilitates user interactions on variable levels of user abstraction. For general users, scripts and applications can be piped together using a 4GL GUI, while more advanced users can generate their own pathway scripts from the terminal.

The modular approach has obvious benefits for distributed and parallel processing applications. With proper scripting, any processing can be carried out on any number of systems, independent of geography, operating system and processor architecture.

GOING TO PYTHON
The splinescan project is being designed from the ground up using PYTHON. I tried experimenting with C but in the end, the programming started to overtake the project, and was becoming inaccessible. Python is an interpreted language, runs on most platforms, is easy to learn and is ideally suited to the scanner project.