Deprecate ImageMaskSeries #581
Labels
category: proposal
proposed enhancements or new features
priority: medium
non-critical problem and/or affecting only a small set of NWB users
Milestone
As discussed at the NWB meeting today. The
ImageMaskSeries
neurodata typehttps://github.com/NeurodataWithoutBorders/nwb-schema/blob/dev/core/nwb.image.yaml#L119-L129
is an
ImageSeries
that contains an additional link to anImageSeries
that is masked. This type appears to be designed to store an alpha mask applied to a visual stimulus, and the mask changes over time. Despite being only a transparency mask, the doc says that it stores values as RGBA, not just A. It's not clear what those other RGB values would be. It's also not clear how this type would be used. Often, a user wants to store the stimulus that the subject saw, which if masked, would be the result of mask + original image. Perhaps if a user showed the same image multiple times at different levels of transparency or different locations of masking, this neurodata type would be useful, but that is a very specific experimental paradigm.ImageMaskSeries
is not documented on PyNWB or MatNWB, and is not used on DANDI (probably in large part because it is not documented). Since NWB 2.0, the NWB team has not heard of a need forImageMaskSeries
.Overall, I think
ImageMaskSeries
does not have a strong use case in modern usage, so to remove cruft and maintenance costs, I propose we deprecateImageMaskSeries
.The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: