Acquire Zarr Driver

This is an Acquire Driver that supports chunked streaming to zarr.

Installing Dependencies

This driver uses the following libraries:

• blosc v1.21.5
• nlohmann-json v3.11.3

We prefer using vcpkg for dependency management, as it integrates well with CMake. Below are instructions for installing vcpkg locally and configuring it to fetch and compile the necessary dependencies (the steps are taken from this vcpkg guide).

• git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
• cd vcpkg && ./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
• Add export commands to your shell's profile script (e.g., ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc)
  • export VCPKG_ROOT=/path/to/vcpkg
  • export PATH=$VCPKG_ROOT:$PATH
  • Click here to learn how to add environment variables on Windows.
• Select the default CMake preset before building (consider deleting your build directory first)
  • cmake --preset=default -B /path/to/build
    • (Alternatively, from the build directory, run cmake --preset=default /path/to/source.)
    • If you're building this project on Windows, you might need to specify your compiler triplet. This ensures that all dependencies are built as static libraries. You can specify the triplet during the preset selection process.
      • cmake --preset=default -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET=x64-windows-static ...

Devices

Storage

• Zarr
• ZarrBlosc1ZstdByteShuffle
• ZarrBlosc1Lz4ByteShuffle
• ZarrV3
• ZarrV3Blosc1ZstdByteShuffle
• ZarrV3Blosc1Lz4ByteShuffle

Using the Zarr storage device

Zarr has additional capabilities relative to the basic storage devices, namely chunking, compression, and multiscale storage.

To compress while streaming, you can use one of the ZarrBlosc1* devices. Chunking is configured using storage_properties_set_chunking_props() when configuring your video stream. Multiscale storage can be enabled or disabled by calling storage_properties_set_enable_multiscale() when configuring the video stream.

For the Zarr v3 version of each device, you can use the ZarrV3* devices. Note: Zarr v3 is not yet supported by ome-zarr-py, so you will not be able to read multiscale metadata from the resulting dataset.

Zarr v3 is supported by zarr-python, but you will need to set two environment variables to work with it:

export ZARR_V3_EXPERIMENTAL_API=1
export ZARR_V3_SHARDING=1

You can also set these variables in your Python script:

import os

# these MUST come before importing zarr
os.environ["ZARR_V3_EXPERIMENTAL_API"] = "1"
os.environ["ZARR_V3_SHARDING"] = "1"

import zarr

Configuring the output array

You will need to specify the shape of the output array when configuring your video stream. The StorageProperties object has a field acquisition_dimensions, which is defined like so:

struct storage_properties_dimensions_s
{
    // The dimensions of the output array.
    struct StorageDimension* data;

    // The number of dimensions in the output array.
    size_t size;
};

Observe that this struct contains a pointer to a struct StorageDimension array, as well as a size_t field size.

Let's look at the StorageDimension struct. This struct has the following fields:

struct StorageDimension
{
    // the name of the dimension as it appears in the metadata, e.g.,
    // "x", "y", "z", "c", "t"
    struct String name;

    // the type of dimension, e.g., spatial, channel, time
    enum DimensionType kind;

    // the expected size of the full output array along this dimension
    uint32_t array_size_px;

    // the size of a chunk along this dimension
    uint32_t chunk_size_px;

    // the number of chunks in a shard along this dimension
    uint32_t shard_size_chunks;
};

Each of your output dimensions should have a corresponding StorageDimension struct. The order of these dimensions matters: the first dimension in the array will be the fastest-varying dimension as you acquire. Then the next dimension will be the next-fastest varying, and so on. The last dimension will be the slowest-varying, i.e., the append dimension.

The first two dimensions should represent the width and height of the frame, respectively. The array_size_px for these dimensions should match the width and height of the frame, and the kind field should be DimensionType_Space. The rest of the dimensions should match the order of acquisition.

You can configure chunking and sharding for each dimension by setting the chunk_size_px and shard_size_chunks fields, respectively.

In general, you should not manipulate this struct, or the array, directly. Instead, there are helper functions that can be used to initialize the array and set up each of the storage dimensions, given a pointer to the StorageProperties struct that contains them:

/// Initializes StorageProperties, allocating string storage on the heap
/// and filling out the struct fields.
/// @returns 0 when `bytes_of_out` is not large enough, otherwise 1.
/// @param[out] out The constructed StorageProperties object.
/// @param[in] first_frame_id (unused; aiming for future file rollover
/// support
/// @param[in] filename A c-style null-terminated string. The file to create
///                     for streaming.
/// @param[in] bytes_of_filename Number of bytes in the `filename` buffer
///                              including the terminating null.
/// @param[in] metadata A c-style null-terminated string. Metadata string
///                     to save along side the created file.
/// @param[in] bytes_of_metadata Number of bytes in the `metadata` buffer
///                              including the terminating null.
/// @param[in] pixel_scale_um The pixel scale or size in microns.
/// @param[in] dimension_count The number of dimensions in the storage
/// array. Each of the @p dimension_count dimensions will be initialized
/// to zero.
int storage_properties_init(struct StorageProperties* out,
                            uint32_t first_frame_id,
                            const char* filename,
                            size_t bytes_of_filename,
                            const char* metadata,
                            size_t bytes_of_metadata,
                            struct PixelScale pixel_scale_um,
                            uint8_t dimension_count);

/// @brief Set the value of the StorageDimension struct at index `index` in
/// `out`.
/// @param[out] out The StorageProperties struct containing the
/// StorageDimension array.
/// @param[in] index The index of the dimension to set.
/// @param[in] name The name of the dimension.
/// @param[in] bytes_of_name The number of bytes in the name buffer.
///                          Should include the terminating NULL.
/// @param[in] kind The type of dimension.
/// @param[in] array_size_px The size of the array along this dimension.
/// @param[in] chunk_size_px The size of a chunk along this dimension.
/// @param[in] shard_size_chunks The number of chunks in a shard along this
///                              dimension.
/// @returns 1 on success, otherwise 0
int storage_properties_set_dimension(struct StorageProperties* out,
                                     int index,
                                     const char* name,
                                     size_t bytes_of_name,
                                     enum DimensionType kind,
                                     uint32_t array_size_px,
                                     uint32_t chunk_size_px,
                                     uint32_t shard_size_chunks);

You will need to call storage_properties_init() before calling storage_properties_set_dimension(). You can find the implementation of these functions in the acquire-common library.

Example

Let's define some terms:

A collection of frames.

A tile is a contiguous section, or region of interest, of a frame.

A collection of frames, divided into tiles.

A chunk is nothing more than some number of stacked tiles from subsequent frames, with each tile in a chunk having the same ROI in its respective frame.

A collection of frames, divided into tiles. A single chunk has been highlighted in red.

A shard is a collection of chunks within a single file or S3 bucket.

Shards aggregate chunks within individual files or S3 buckets.

Suppose you have a video stream with the following dimensions:

• Width: 1920 px
• Height: 1080 px
• Channels: 3
• Time: 1000 frames (per channel)

You want to divide your frames into 4 x 4 tiles of size 480 x 270, and you want each channel to be stored in separate chunks. You also want to aggregate 100 time points into a single chunk. You will end up with 4 x 4 = 16 chunks of size 480 x 270 x 1 x 100 for each channel, for a total of 48 chunks, for every 100 time points. Suppose further that you wanted to aggregate each of these chunks into a single shard. Configuring your storage dimensions might look like this:

struct StorageProperties props = { 0 };

const char filename[] = "my_video.zarr";
const char external_metadata[] = R"({"my":"metadata"})";
const struct PixelScale sample_spacing_um = { 1, 1 };
storage_properties_init(&props,
                        0, // first frame id
                        (char*)filename,
                        strlen(filename) + 1,
                        (char*)external_metadata,
                        sizeof(external_metadata),
                        sample_spacing_um,
                        4); // number of dimensions

// width
storage_properties_set_dimension(
  &props,
  0,
  "x", // name
  2,   // number of bytes in the name, including the null terminator
  DimensionType_Space, // type of the dimension
  1920,                // full size of the dimension
  480,                 // number of pixels in a chunk
  4); // aggregate all 4 chunks into a shard along this dimension

// height
storage_properties_set_dimension(
  &props,
  1,
  "y", // name
  2,   // number of bytes in the name, including the null terminator
  DimensionType_Space, // type of the dimension
  1080,                // full size of the dimension
  270,                 // number of pixels in a chunk
  4); // aggregate all 4 chunks into a shard along this dimension

// channels
storage_properties_set_dimension(
  &props,
  2
  "c", // name
  2,   // number of bytes in the name, including the null terminator
  DimensionType_Channel, // type of the dimension
  3,                     // full size of the dimension
  1,                     // number of pixels in a chunk (1 channel per chunk)
  1); // one single-channel chunk per shard along this dimension

// time
storage_properties_set_dimension(
  &props,
  3,
  "t", // name
  2,   // number of bytes in the name, including the null terminator
  DimensionType_Time, // type of the dimension
  0,   // append dimension; we don't know the full size a priori
  100, // number of pixels in a chunk
  1);  // one 100-timepoint chunk per shard along this dimension

Compression

Compression is done via Blosc. Supported codecs are lz4 and zstd, which can be used by using the ZarrBlosc1Lz4ByteShuffle and ZarrBlosc1ZstdByteShuffle devices, respectively. For a comparison of these codecs, please refer to the Blosc docs.

Configuring multiscale

In order to enable or disable multiscale storage for your video stream, you can call storage_properties_set_enable_multiscale() on your StorageProperties object after calling storage_properties_init() on it.

int
storage_properties_set_enable_multiscale(struct StorageProperties* out,
                                         uint8_t enable);

To enable, pass 1 as the enable parameter, and to disable, pass 0.

If enabled, the Zarr writer will write a pyramid of frames, with each level of the pyramid halving each dimension of the previous level, until the dimensions are less than or equal to a single tile.

Example

Suppose your frame size is 1920 x 1080, with a tile size of 384 x 216. Then the sequence of levels will have dimensions 1920 x 1080, 960 x 540, 480 x 270, and 240 x 135.