One way is to put the plugin in one of two different Application support folders. They are /Library/Application Support/MPLab/PlugIns/ and ~/Library/Application Support/MPLab/PlugIns/. Plugins installed in the first location will be available to anyone using the computer. The tilde ('~') in the second location is short hand for the current user's home directory. Plugins installed in an individual user's Application Support folder will only be available to that user.
Plugins can also be removed using the Info window: select a plugin from the list and click the 'Remove...' button.
Plugins can be enabled or disabled by clicking the checkbox next to it's name. Disabling a plugin this way prevents it from being loaded by HEAT.
Changes made using any of these methods do not take effect until the next time HEAT is launched, so if the application is already running then the changes will have no effect on the current session. Quit then restart HEAT to have the changes take effect.
The Preferences window can be accessed with the 'Preferences...' menu item of the HEAT menu. The Plugins pane of the Preferences window has a list of all installed plugins. The plugin list shows the name of each plugin, what type of plugin it is, the version number for the plugin itself, and whether it is enabled or disabled.
Each plugin can be enabled or disabled using the checkbox next to its name. Enabling or disabling plugins here takes effect immediately, even if HEAT is currently processing images or video. There is also a Plugins menu that can be used to enable or disable plugins (all at once, or individually).
Some plugins have additional preference choices that are shown when the plugin is selected in the list. See the Rubios plugin, for example.
As part of CERT's normal processing a face is found, rotated to a normal vertical position and cropped. Most later processing happens on the face patch, rather than the full image. The face patches can be saved as individual image files as they are generated. Enable the Patch Generator plugin, then choose a folder and an output file format in the Patch Generator's preference pane.
Most of the output formats are standard image types, but the RImage format is the same format that HEAT uses internally for handling images. This is a simple, uncompressed file format.
If either of the Unconstrained Least Squares or Procrustes Face Alignment Methods are selected in the General Preferences pane then four features are used to rotate and crop faces. By default those four features are the Left Eye, Right Eye, Mouth and Nose (called "slots"). Using the Feature Averaging plugin it is possible to substitute one or more other features for the four original ones.
The Feature Averaging preference pane contains two tables and one button. The table on the left contains one entry for each of the "slots". The right hand table contains a list of all of the feature plugins currently installed in HEAT (whether enabled or not). For each of the slots, one or more feature's can be averaged together by clicking on the slot name, then turning on the checkbox next to the feature's name in the right hand list.
If any required features (features that have been checked in the right hand table) are not currently enabled, then the "Enable Required Features" button will become active. Clicking that button will enable all of the required plugins. This could take some time.