Improving napari Functionality and Integration Capability

The ImageJ ecosystem, including ImageJ, ImageJ2 and Fiji, is an essential toolbox in biological image analysis. With thousands of plugins and over 20 years of development, ImageJ provides a wealth of functionality to the scientific community. However, as a Java application, it does not meet the growing needs of Python data scientists. The popularity and accessibility of napari presents a great opportunity for unifying these two image analysis ecosystems. Both ImageJ2 and napari have been designed with the aim of extensibility. Their unification is feasible through napari-imagej, a new napari plugin backed by bidirectional Java-Python adaptation, plus targeted enhancement of napari’s plugin mechanism.

This project will make plugins, extensions, and functionality more accessible to support the long-term growth of napari.