Processing B2ND files

The default format of the files recorded with XiLens is the n-dimensional arrays developed by the BLOSC2 team. These arrays provide a lot of useful features such as being able to store all images in a single file in a lossless compression fashion.

Visualize data

XiLens provides a simple viewer that can open the .b2nd files to visualize its contents. This can be done from the viewer tab in XiLens. Alternatively, you can create your own viewer using blosc2 to read the file contents. You can see the next section for more information on how to open the files.

Process data

We strongly recommend using Python's library blosc2 to open the .b2nd files. To do so, you first need to install it:

conda create -n xilens python=3.10
conda activate xilens
pip install blosc2

Now you can open the contents of each file as follows:

import blosc2

x = blosc2.open("path-to-file.b2nd", "r")
first_image = x[0, ...]

# print metadata
meta = x.schunk.vlmeta
print(meta.keys())

You should notice that opening the file does not load the data, it merely prepares everything to read it. The data is only loaded when using slicing through the opened file as for the first_image example above. The metadata of the loaded file behaves as a dictionary, so you can use it as such. The metadata of these files contains useful information such as time stamps, camera temperature, etc.