OpenCV

OpenCV is Intel® Open Source Computer Vision Library. It is a collection of C functions and a few C++ classes that implement some popular Image Processing and Computer Vision algorithms.

If you want to gain the great performance of C without being involved in the tiny details (like creating your own data structures & customized functions, etc) in the same way you used to on Mat-lab, OpenCV is your best choice. Yet, other stuff not related to image processing & computer vision directly (like neural networks, etc) won't be provided through OpenCV (yet you can find them available on the Internet in C, also).

For example, the above image was captured by a web-cam, segmented, masked with the original image from the web-cam again, & finally saved on disk with a few lines of code.

The key features :

OpenCV has cross-platform middle-to-high level API that consists of a few hundreds (>300) C functions. It does not rely on external libraries, though it can use some when it is possible.

OpenCV is free for both non-commercial and commercial use (see the license for details).

OpenCV provides transparent interface to Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP). That is, it loads automatically IPP libraries optimized for specific processor at runtime, if they are available. That grantees even faster execution (C is already fast on modest hardware) for usually complex image processing operations, making use of the available hardware (if it's Intel®'s). More information about IPP can be retrieved @ http://www.intel.com/software/products/ipp/index.htm

For more information about OpenCV :

• Intel's pages : http://www.intel.com/technology/computing/opencv/
• Yahoo!Groups : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OpenCV/
• SourceForge : http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary [u can download z lib here]