Question

I’m looking to getting into image/video processing and was searching for a good library to start with. I’ve heard of two, OpenCV and IVT. I’d like to hear your opinion about which one is better to start with, what are the advantages/disadvantages of both and which one is better for possible commercial use later on.

Answer 1

Both offer very similar functionality – about 95% of it overlaps.

Both are BSD(ish) licensed and are widely used in commercial packages.

IVT is a cleaner more modern C++ design, but the new c++ bindings to opencv work well. Opencv has a few more ‘C’ type macros but it also means it’s usable from C. Opencv is also very well supported by python and other languages, don’t know about IVT.

There is also CImg. It requires only a single header file and uses C++ type templates so you write code like result = image.blur().sharpen().edge() almost like Mathematica!
It doesn’t have the same depth of functionality, especially in things like recognition and machine learning, but is definitely easier to use. It’s GPL/LGPL so usable commercially with care.

OpenCV is much more widely used, so has a bigger set of users who might answer questions – but it also has a MUCH bigger set of beginners asking questions !

The decider for me is that openCV is moving to support (almost) all the functionality in CUDA (ie on a parallel GPU) which is fantastic for anything needing realtime video processing.

Other than this I couldn’t comment on the performance I didn’t really benchmark IVT enough. OpenCV does use custom SSE2 assembler for a lot of the operations and uses TBB to parallel the rest if you have a multicore/hyperthreaded CPU.