Meaning of image in intel pin tool

Question

I am new on Intel pin tool, and begin to study pin tool recently. In tutorial, it describe modes of pin tool:

Sometimes, however, it can be useful to look at different granularity than a trace. For this purpose Pin offers two additional modes: image and routine instrumentation. These modes are implemented by "caching" instrumentation requests and hence incur a space overhead, these modes are also referred to as ahead-of-time instrumentation.

I want to know what is the meaning of "image".

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can have more details about images in the documentation of the "IMG" Object: https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/pintool/docs/71313/Pin/html/group__IMG__BASIC__API.html

An IMG represents all the data structures corresponding to a binary (executable). Can be accessed at instrumentation time and analysis time. Note: Shared libraries are also represented by the IMG abstraction. Moreover, the IMG objects are created in a lazy fashion. Only if a shared library is loaded and IMG is created. Over the lifetime of a process the number IMG objects created may hence increase. APIs from this group are available in any thread, including any internal thread spawned by the tool.

You can see that an image represents a binary (executable)... which contains sections (.text for instance)... which contains routines... etc