Image processing libraries [closed]

Answer 1

Check out the python Scipy library. It's an open source fast n-dimensional array manipulation library in python. It has all the basic image processing tools:

• linear and rank filters
• FFT, convolution
• morphological operation

It doesn't have all the more advanced functions of Matlab's Image Processing Toolbox. However, as Vereb suggested, a lot of those can be found in ITK (also available in python flavor).

Like you I wanted to get away from matlab to a dynamic language like python. And like you, I was disappointed by PIL, when I realized it was just an ImageMagick in python. You'll still need to use PIL for reading/writing images.

To get a Matlab-like image processing experience with python get Numpy/Scipy, Matplotlib and Spyder. All of which and more is conveniently packaged in Python(X,Y) for windows only.

Answer 2

Fastest and most professional image processing library (and complete SDK) is HALCON. (www.mvtec.com) It is not open source but fully supports C#, C++, C, VB.Net etc...

Answer 3

Intel Performance Primitives is very fast and very mature. Most of the functionality is low-level, ranging from linear filters, arithmetic operations, FFT, wavelets, geometric transforms (...), but it also contains a few high-level algorithms e.g. for inpainting or segmentation. It's extremely fast, and well documented. I would definitely recommend it for commercial development (not sure if there are open-source licenses).

Answer 4

GDAL serves as a mature proxy for different image formats. Bindings for several languages, including Python

Answer 5

As far as I know ITK is used for medical imaging:
http://www.itk.org

Answer 6

OpenCV is a very fast and mature one in C. The bad side is it is not object oriented, which is not one of your criterias I presume. Lots of functionality like connected component analysis are included.

JAI (Java Advanced Imaging) is fast and very mature and it is also object oriented. It may take a little bit to warm up with this library. But powerful and manageable.

If you are planning to make some academic research or prototyping go for OpenCV, if your aim is to develop a commercial or a large scale software, I recommend JAI.

UPDATE

OpenCV now has C++ and Python APIs. I have been using OpenCV C++ for 3 weeks now, the API is way better than C API. OpenCV is more stable, and community has grown. And there are lots of ready to use advanced algorithms in OpenCV. It is worth considering.