Mavis is a C++ class, not a standalone application. It needs a program to load and run it. The Windows program MavisCtl (Mavis Control Program) that comes with mavis does this.

As well as loading and running it, MavisCtl displays visual feedback from mavis as a picture on its GUI. This feedback helps in "seeing" what mavis is doing. Various mavis capabilities use visual feedback to display images that are helpful for debugging or for setting parameters. Visual feedback is also helpful for understanding how video input data differs from human vision. In the screenshot below, a highlight that was barely evident to human vision created enough glare to white out a large section of the image. This happened because the area was dark overall, and the camera's dynamic range was not large enough to capture details in both the bright and dark areas of the image.

The GUI controls (list and buttons) shown below provide a means for "talking" directly to mavis through MavisCtl. When MavisCtl is first started, these GUI controls are not available. They only become available (and visible) if mavisclient.dll, the interface dll for controlling mavis, is loaded into MavisCtl. To load the dll, select File > load dll. The GUI controls should appear. Now MavisCtl is acting as the client application for mavis as well as running mavis. By using the GUI controls to manually try out various mavis capabilities, you can get a feel for how mavis works even without writing code. This ability to use mavis manually can also help when developing and debugging code that uses mavis.

Figure 1: MavisCtl GUI with mavisclient.dll loaded