You will find some explanation about technical terms often used in pyFAI and its documentation.
The azimuthal integrator (ai hereafter) is an object, in the sense of Object Oriented Programming which can transform an image into a powder diffraction pattern using the integrate1d or integrate2d methods. It contains (inherits) a Geometry and caches the look-up table for optimized integration. Ai objects are usually obtained from loading a PONI-file obtained after calibration. See AzimuthalIntegrator
Action of determining the geometry of an experiment geometry using a reference sample. Calibration is performed using the pyFAI-calib tool to generate the PONI-file., See its Calibration
Detectors are all area detectors in pyFAI, which mean pixels are indexed by 2 indices often references as (slow, fast) or (row, column) or simply (1, 2). Indices are using the C-convention. The detector object is responsible for calculating the pixel position in space (so in 3D). and assumes each pixel is defined by 4-corners. Detectors can be defined by many ways: from a shape and a pixel size, from a tabulated detector (there are over 60 detector defined) or from a NeXus file. See Simple detector
Distortion correction is the action of correcting the spatial distortion from an image due to a detector. The object is defined from detector and the target is an image with a regular grid and a given pixel size and shape.
The geometry object is in charge of calculating all kind of coordinates (cartesian, polar, ...) for any point in the image, a step both needed for integration and calibration. The geometry object composes (contains) a detector and contains the 3 translations (dist, poni1 and poni2) and 3 rotations (rot1, rot2, rot3) of the detector in space. It knows in addition about the wavelength. The object is saved in a PONI-file, see Detector position
Acronym for Point Of Normal Incidence. It is the pixel coordinates of the orthogonal projection of the sample position on the detector (for plane detectors, or the plane z=0 for other). The PONI coincide with the beam center in the case of orthogonal setup but most of the time differs.
Small text file generated from pyFAi-calib or when saving a geometry object which contains the detector description, its position in space and the wavelength. Used to initialize AzimuthalIntegrator or Geometry objects.
A worker allow, once parameterized, to perform always the same processing on all images in a stack, for example azimuthal integration, distortion correction or simple pixel-wise operation.