The MathWorks announces new image acquisition toolbox, latest release of image processing toolbox

The MathWorks today announced major new capabilities in its tools for imaging applications with the launch of the Image Acquisition Toolbox and the release of the Image Processing Toolbox 4. Based on MATLAB, the toolboxes provide engineers and scientists with a dedicated solution for imaging applications that combines a direct interface to industry standard frame grabbers and video devices with advanced image processing algorithms.

With the power to acquire image data directly into the MATLAB environment, customers can easily visualise and evaluate live digital image streams, apply advanced image processing algorithms to perform analyses of data, and even develop custom algorithms to process the image data.

By eliminating the need to write custom code or use single purpose software tools during the acquisition and analysis phases, companies can dramatically reduce research and development cycles. This enables them to produce and react to image-based results in a much shorter time frame.

"As long-time users of MATLAB and its Image Processing Toolbox, we selected the Image Acquisition Toolbox to stream live data directly into the MATLAB programming environment from a camera for precision part alignment and laser targeting processes," said Bernard Siu, founder and chief researcher at Simpex Technologies, Inc, a leading provider of technical and engineering support services to the semiconductor and defence industries.

"As a result, we were able to quickly integrate image acquisition functionality into our application using just a few lines of code, saving us valuable time. We are looking to use MATLAB as the primary language for our Laser Ultrasonic Bond Detection System, and this is a major step toward that goal."

With the release of the Image Acquisition Toolbox 1 and Image Processing Toolbox 4, The MathWorks is providing the tools in a single environment that imaging professionals require to complete their work. "The MathWorks is enabling its customers to obtain image data easily, process and analyse the information quickly, and develop advanced algorithms without a forced transition between software programs," said Lisa Kempler, director of MATLAB product marketing, The MathWorks. "This minimises setup overhead and overall complexity of imaging tasks."

The Image Acquisition Toolbox simplifies the acquisition and analysis process by enabling users to connect to and configure hardware, preview video, and stream images directly into MATLAB for analysis and visualization. This simplifies an often time-consuming process of acquiring image data with one software package and then transferring the data to another package for analysis and processing. The toolbox extends the MATLAB technical computing environment to include functions for acquiring video and images from PC-compatible frame-grabber cards and video devices. Key features of the toolbox include:

* Direct interfaces to analogue and digital frame grabbers from Matrox and Data Translation.

* Communication with Windows-compatible video-capture devices, such as USB and FireWire (IEEE-1394) scientific video cameras, as well as Web cameras, video capture boards, and DV camcorders.

* Live video previewing.

* Simultaneous image acquisition and image processing.

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The Image Processing Toolbox is the de facto industry standard for imaging professionals. Building upon this solid foundation, the Image Processing Toolbox 4 delivers significant new features and enhancements in speed and performance. Based on internal benchmark tests, The MathWorks found that the speed of some performance-enhanced image processing functions increased by a factor of more than 20. In addition, the reduction in memory usage for several image processing functions was reduced between 15% to 100%.

The key features and enhancements of the toolbox include:

* New image viewer capabilities, including display of image metadata along with pan, scroll, zoom, and overview tools for large images.

* Enhanced colour space functions that enable customers to read ICC colour profiles and conduct conversions to device independent colour spaces.

* New image enhancement methods.

* Enhanced DICOM export support.

* Faster image arithmetic functions based on the Intel Performance Primitives Library.