Fast Cross-Platform C/C++ Image Processing Libraries

Question

What are some cross platform and high performance image libraries for image processing (resizing and finding the color/hue histograms). No gui needed. This is for C/C++.

Answer 1

There are also VTK and ITK, with a huge amount of manifold image processing algorithms.

Answer 2

I don't think I've seen anything better in features and performance than HALCON from MVTec. It provides all sort computer vision and image processing algorithms out-of-the-box and plenty of real life examples. The library uses multithreading as much as algorithms could possibly allow and GPU when available. It's very cross-platform and provides a fantastic IDE that will allow you to export your prototype code (algorithm) to many languages including C, C++, C# and more.

One of the best features of this library is how they treat region objects. It is just incredibly smart and efficient both for storage and mask processing. Unfortunately OpenCV has a lot to learn from it.

The main problem with this package is the price (stupidly high) but if you are working on a project where you don't need to deploy runtime licenses (e.g. SaaS) then this is the way to go, look no further if you require serious image processing and computer vision.

Answer 3

There are also:

• Framewave based on AMD Performance Library which provides signal and image processing features
• GraphicsMagick multi-threaded derivative from ImageMagick

Answer 4

ExactImage is a fast C++ image processing library. Unlike many other library frameworks it allows operation in several color spaces and bit depths natively, resulting in low memory and computational requirements.

Answer 5

I help maintain libvips, a free, cross-platform C/C++ scientific image-processing library. It is fast and works well on very large images.

I did a very simple benchmark: load a 5,000 x 5,000 pixel RGB tif, crop 100 pixels off every edge, shrink 10%, sharpen, and save again. On this trivial test at least, vips is more than twice as fast as anything else I've tried.