Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) GeniePro software is a general purpose, interactive, adaptive tool for automatically finding and labeling areas of interest in image data. Rather than having to teach the program how to find areas of interest, the user has merely to provide examples of these areas; and Genie Pro then designs, tests, and perfects its algorithms to produce consistent and accurate image recognition. The software uses techniques from statistical machine learning theory and evolutionary computation theory to perform robust and customized automatic feature extraction in multispectral, hyperspectral, panchromatic, and multi-instrument fused imagery.

Originally developed to analyze multispectral satellite data, GeniePro works with satellite data, aerial imagery, and medical images. It has been applied to a variety of tasks, including crop and terrain mapping; road, railroad, river, and communications network mapping; broad-area search for vehicles and buildings; and cancer cell identification in histological images.

Genie was first used during the Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico to track the path of the wildfire for the Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation team. It was used again just after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City to track the cloud of ash and soot from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. In 2002, Genie received an R&D 100 Award and recently received the highest score in a government-sponsored competitive evaluation of imaging software.
GeniePro, the most recent version of the software, was transferred to two firms through exclusive, field-of-use licenses. Observera, Inc. licensed the technology from Los Alamos for remote-sensing and geographic information system applications. Observera’s release of a commercial version of the software, Genie Pro 2.0, marks the beginning of a line of new geospatial products. Aperio Technologies Inc., a leader in digital pathology for the healthcare and life sciences industry, obtained a license for all digital pathology applications and has incorporated GeniePro into its Spectrum™ digital pathology information management software. This has enabled its use as a preprocessing engine for various tissue-scoring algorithms, such as finding tumor regions in digital immunohistochemistry slides.