CV Software

This page collects wonderful resource for computer vision research (mostly software packages/tools) and technical references.  Closed-source software tools are explicitly noted, otherwise opensource. (Update: Mar 02 2012)

General Purpose

• OpenCV Library (General purpose and opensource, currently actively maintained and provides C, C++, Python, and Octave interfaces)
  
• Mexopencv (A very nice Matlab wrapper for part of the OpenCV library. Need OpenCV >=2.3.1)
  

• Piotr’s Image and Video Toolbox for Matlab
• Peter’s Matlab Functions for Computer Vision
• Pilot European Image Processing Archive: Computer Vision Software (archive of various categories)
• CMU Computer Vision Homepage: Software archive

Specialized

Classic Vision Algorithms and Related

• KLT Tracking (Implemented in C.  Also in OpenCV)
  
• Efficient graph-based image segmentation (Simple, efficient, elegant, and fast! … Worth many good words)
  
• Normalized cut segmentation (Elegant but slow, not well maintained. Don’t tell Mr. Malik about it, please)
• Camera calibration toolbox for matlab (by Jean-Yves Bouguet from Caltech)
• levmar: Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear least square algorithms in C/C++
• sba: Sparse bundle adjustment based on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm in C/C++
• Structure-from-Motion Matlab Toolbox (due to packed into OpenCV after 2011 summer)

Feature Extraction

• VLFeat (SIFT, MSER, plus fast kmeans, hierarchical kmeans … )
• SIFT Demo by David Lowe (closed-source. Also in OpenCV)
• SURF (Speeded Up Robust Features, original implementation, closed-source. Also in OpenCV)
• OpenSURF (An opensource implementation of SURF)
• FAST Corner Detection (also in OpenCV)
• Star, Harris, etc (in OpenCV)
• Feature Detectors and Descriptors (many features under comparison)

Support Vector Machines (SVM)

• LIBSVM (A Library for Support Vector Machines)
• SVMlight (Another popular implementation of SVM)
• shogun (A large-scale ML toolbox, specialized in SVM. It provides unified interface for several popular SVM implementations, and features supports for Multiple Kernel Learning. )

Graphical Models and Inference Algorithms

• Software by Kevin Murphy and students (A bunch of codes/packages for statistical learning methods, notably MRF, CRF, HMM, etc)
• Comparison of software for graphical models (Yes, everything about playing with probability in graphs!)
• Efficient belief propagation in early vision (Felzenszwalb’s another nice contribution!)

Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensions

• FLANN – Fast library for approximate nearest neighbors (automatic algorithm selection and parameter tuning, another contribution of David Lowe)
• Approximate nearest neighbor searching (ANN library, you may also consider LSH)
• Locality sensitive hashing (E2LSH)
• Fast nearest neighbor search using GPU (via exhaustive search)

Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction

• Matlab toolbox for dimensionality reduction (a comprehensive collection)

Optimization Packages

• CVX (disciplined convex optimization package for Matlab) and CVXMOD + CVXOPT its Python counterpart
• CVXGEN (highly customized C code generator with Matlab wrapper for small-scale linear and quadratic programs)
• TFOCS ( Templates for First-Order Conic Solvers, esp. for optimization involving sparsity and low-rankness)
• Mosek Optimization Software (Commercial software package but with free full-functional academic license. Need to know some optimization basics to deploy)
• Graph cut in computer vision (Note: NOT normalized cuts. It seems not all efficient algorithms are developed by mathematicians!)
• Decision tree for optimization software (A wealthy collection/guide of optimization resources, including software, data, books and tutorials).

Compressive Sensing (SC) /Sparse Representation

• Sparse modeling software package (General-purpose package for various sparsity-related problems, include Lasso, elastic-net, and sparse dictionary learning. Closed-source)
• SparseLab (Various solvers for the lasso problem)
• Rice University L1 Related Optimization ( Various L1 related solvers, including cases for Total Variation regularizers)
• Collection of Reconstruction solvers/codes for compressive sensing (Section 4, Encyclopedic collection of software tools of SC related by the author of Nuit Blanche)

GPU Programming for CV (Don’t have a GPU on your PC? You’re out …)

• OpenVIDIA: Parallel GPU Computer Vision
• CULA – GPU accelerated linear algebra library
• MGAMA – Matrix algebra on GPU
• GPU4Vision