Hoku is an image processing software

Hoku is a Java-based software package to process multispectral image data sets to recover writings that have been damaged or erased. It is distributed free-of-charge, without warranty.

Dr. Keith T. Knox, creator of Hoku, independent imaging scientist and EMEL chief scientific advisor.
Hoku is a batch processing software package. Jobs are defined and parameters are set interactively with a graphical user interface, but jobs are run in batch mode until they conclude.

There are no interactive image processing methods available. You cannot touch-up or draw on an image with this software, but you can apply any of several image processing methods to enhance image details that otherwise are difficult to see.

How To

Hoku applications are available for the macOS, Windows, Linux. Download the Zip file containing the appropriate installation program from the following links. Double-click the downloaded Zip file to extract and decompress the installation folder.

Full instructions on how to install Hoku are contained in the “Instructions” text file within each folder. Installing Java on your computer is not needed for these applications. Hoku has the necessary Java runtime code embedded within it.

To install the new Hoku application on a Mac or Linux, you must have system administrator privileges on your computer. If you do not have such privileges, the software can be loaded for you a system administrator. Administrator privileges are not required on Windows.

On Windows, to upgrade Hoku from an earlier version, you will need first to uninstall any previous Hoku that is currently installed. On the Mac, it will ask you if it can uninstall the previous version for you, as you install the new version.

Your existing data, on your Hoku Shelf and Hoku Desktop will not be changed. All of your existing data will be available to you in the new version of Hoku.

You may contact the author at the email address below if you have questions, need help on a specific problem, run into problems, or have comments or suggestions.

Keith Knox

Learn Hoku

A Wiki / Tutorial that can help you familiarize with Hoku.

https://wiki.hoku.emelibrary.org/

Download Hoku

Hoku is available for a variety of platforms.

Latest Hoku version is:
v3.1, released on 30 January 2026.
New Features in version 3.1
Your user data is now stored in the official location for an application’s user data. The user data locations for the different platforms are shown in the last page of the Tutorial. When you upgrade Hoku to version 3.1, all of your user data will be moved
to its new location, automatically upon installation of version 3.1.

Besides the regular “shelf”, two new shelves have been added, one called “archive” and the other “trash”. By right-clicking on an item on the “shelf”, you may choose to move that item to the “archive” or the “trash”. An item can only be deleted from
the “trash”. Any item in the “archive” or the “trash” can be restored to the “shelf”.

All jobs, either stars (4-pointed) or clusters (8-pointed) on the Desktop or the Shelf, and folders on the Shelf, now have a modification time associated with them. This time is updated whenever a job or folder is modified. You can view its associated time by right-clicking the item and selecting “info” from the popup menu.

A “dark” mode was added to Hoku. You can enter the “dark” mode from the popup menu in the Cupboard and selecting one of the three options in the “Appearance” sub-menu on the popup menu. The “dark” mode should prove useful when Hoku
is run in a dark environment.

An editor has been added to the “exec” module for generating the instructions for specifying the file path of the input and output image files. The editor can be invoked by selecting the ”edit” button next to the image file dialog boxes.

Learn Hoku

A Wiki / Tutorial that can help you familiarize with Hoku.

License

Copyright (C) 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026  Keith T. Knox

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You can read the GNU General Public License in LICENSE.txt. You may also obtain a copy of the license by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

Keith Knox

30 January 2026