The acronym OMA stands for Optical Multi-channel Analyzer and is what Princeton Applied Research called their early SIT vidicon cameras.

The OMA program was developed by researchers as a way to investigate and post-process photometric images from CCD detectors used for laser-based imaging of reacting and non-reacting flows as well as some spectroscopic applications. Originally written in assembly language on a PDP11 computer, the software has been around since the late 1970s. It has since grown on Classic Mac OS to be a very powerful image processing platform. Additionally, OMA is used in many labs as the front end interface for controlling I/O devices such as cameras, Digital I/O cards and stepper motors. OMA is a powerful control, acquisition and processing system for photometric images. This version has been updated to run under Mac OS X (v10.3.x).

OMA had been sold commercially for a while at the US $1000 per copy, but in this new initiative, both the Application and the Source Code are being released to the research community under the GNU Public License (GPL). It is hoped that this move will create and foster a community of OMA users who (in finding solutions to their own specific imaging needs) are able to contribute to the development of functionality within OMA. We encourage interested programmers to help implement future development directions and make suggestions.