Free Planetary Imaging PreProcessor 2022-08-02

PIPP's main purpose is to crop each image frame and select only the best quality frames to reduce the memory and processing requirements of the stacking software. For example, this would allow the best 1500 frames from a 7200 frame AVI (2 minute AVI at 60 fps) to be cropped ready for stacking by Registax. On my PC, Registax does not handle AVI files with that many frames but can easily handle 1500 pre-processed bitmap files so this is very useful.
PIPP was originally written to speed up the my own processing of the multitude large AVI files that that each planetary imaging session seems to generate. Now that PIPP has reached the point where it does actually speed up my processing workflow I decided to make it available to others to see if they find it useful and maybe give a little back to the astronomy community.
PIPP's functions:

• Load a sequence of images from supported video files, SER video files or TIFF/BMP/FITS/JPEG/RAW camera image files.
• Calibrate frames with dark, flat and dark flat calibration frames.
• Debayer raw frames from colour cameras to produce colour frames.
• Check each frame contains a planet that is completely on the image and discard any frames that do not.
• Check for and discard overexposed frames.
• Centre the planet in the frames.
• Offset the centred planet.
• Crop each frame around the centred planet.
• Apply a fixed gain to each frame.
• Apply a fixed gamma correct to each frame.
• Apply a median noise filter to each frame.
• Stretch histogram for each frame (equalising R, G and B channels for colour images).
• Estimate the quality of each frame and reorder the processed frames in order of quality.
• Keep only the number of best quality frames specified by the user.
• Split colour frames into R, G and B frames.
• Save processed frames as a sequence of TIFF/BMP/FITS image files, as a single AVI/SER video file ready for stacking or archiving or as an animated GIF for sharing online.