of technique and (optimized) implementation; there is even a Wikipedia entry and a discussion
website supporting it. Then there are the VXL libraries (the Vision-something-Libraries, groan).
This is ‘a collection of C++ libraries designed for computer vision research and implementation’.
Finally, there is Adobe’s Generic Image Library (GIL), which aims to ease difficulties with
writing imaging-related code that is both generic and efficient. Note that these are open source,
but there are licences and conditions on use and exploitation.
A set of web links is shown in Table 1.2 for established freeware and commercial soft-
ware image processing systems. Perhaps the best selection can be found at the general site,
from the computer vision homepage software site at Carnegie Mellon (repeated later in
Table 1.5).
Table 1.2 Software websites
Packages (freeware or student version indicated by
)
General Site Carnegie Mellon http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/cil/ftp/html/v-source.html
(large popular index including links to research code, image
processing toolkits, and display tools)
Visiquest
(Khoros)
Accusoft http://www.accusoft.com/
Hannover University http://www.tnt.uni-hannover.de/soft/imgproc/khoros/
AdOculos
(+ Textbook)
The Imaging Source http://www.theimagingsource.com/
CVIPtools
Southern Illinois
University
http://www.ee.siue.edu/CVIPtools/
LaboImage
Geneva University http://cuiwww.unige.ch/vision/LaboImage/labo.html
TN-Image
Thomas J. Nelson http://brneurosci.org/tnimage.html (scientific image analysis)
OpenCV Intel http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/opencv/index.htm
and http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/
VXL Many international
contributors
http://vxl.sourceforge.net/
GIL Adobe http://opensource.adobe.com/gil/
1.5 Mathematical systems
Several mathematical systems have been developed. These offer what is virtually a word-
processing system for mathematicians. Many are screen based, using a Windows system. The
advantage of these systems is that you can transpose mathematics pretty well directly from
textbooks, and see how it works. Code functionality is not obscured by the use of data structures,
although this can make the code appear cumbersome. A major advantage is that the system
provides low-level functionality and data visualization schemes, allowing the user to concentrate
on techniques alone. Accordingly, these systems afford an excellent route to understand, and
appreciate, mathematical systems before the development of application code, and to check that
the final code works correctly.
Introduction 15

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