High-level level language for image processing

My final year project group is planning to build a real time application with neural network support and need to h开发者_运维技巧andle image processing efficiently, Any language suggestions would be very much helpful. Thanks.

Mathematica may offer some useful features. The last couple of releases have added quite a lot of image processing functionality. You can get a taste by looking at these blog entries:

• How to Make a Webcam Intruder Alarm with Mathematica
• The Battle of the Marlborough Maze at Blenheim Palace Continues
• The Incredible Convenience of Mathematica Image Processing

Mathematica is an interpreted language, which would appear to present an obstacle to your real-time constraints. However, Mathematica has always integrated well will foreign code (notably C, Java and .NET) and the latest release adds considerable new capabilities with respect to C-code generation, dynamic-library loading and CUDA / OpenCL GPU programming.

Alas, Mathematica is not FOSS and is pretty expensive for commercial use. However, they give great student discounts (90%+, last time I checked) and some college/university departments have site licenses.

On the down side, the Mathematica language is quite unconventional and it takes time to get into the swing of things. IMO, the effort is worth it, but the learning curve might be too long if your project timelines are short.

Note: I am not affiliated with WRI in any way.

My suggestion is OpenCV and C++. OpenCV is also usable with Python, but I don't recommend it if you need to write fast code, Python can be really slow.

How about Python? There is PIL, which

adds image processing capabilities to your Python interpreter. This library supports many file formats, and provides powerful image processing and graphics capabilities.

An introductory article about NN with python and a feed forward NN library:

• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-neurnet/
• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ffnet/0.6

Matlab provides a lot of features for image processing. May be slightly slow, but I assume performance is not an issue.

ImageMagick is suppose to be real good, but I have no first-hand experience. Mathematica?