What is ICL ?¶
ICL is a novel C++ computer-vision library developed in the neuroinformatics group of the university of Bielefeld and in CITEC. It unifies both, performance and user friendliness. ICL provides a large set of simple-to-use classes and functions to facilitate development of complex computer vision applications.
A simple application for image acquisition and visualization can be written in less than 15 lines of C++ code (see example).
Design Principles¶
During the design and development process, the following main goals took center stage:
Rich set of Support Functions¶
ICL is a full featured software framework for developing interactive computer vision applications. In contrast to other libraries, ICL provides a huge and well chosen set of support and utility functions and classes. These allow for implementing your algorithms and applications directly in ICL, i.e. usually, there is no need to learn how to use 3rd party tools. Whenever ICL uses an external library for providing extra functionality, it is wrapped seamlessly in order to provide modern and ICL-conform interfaces.
Optimal performace¶
ICL can optionally be linked against the Intel IPP-Library in order to enhance it’s processing speed significantly. Most functions are implemented as Intel IPP wrappers internally but we also provide fallback implementations for data-types that are not supported by Intel IPP or for the case where Intel IPP is not available. ICL images can be used as shallow wrappers around existing data structures and their raw-data can be accessed directly. By these means, image processing applications can be implemented without any overhead for data-conversion or copying.
Powerful Generic Interfaces¶
ICL provides a set of very powerful generic interfaces for image-filters, image-grabbers and image-outputs. E.g. the GenericGrabber-class can be used to acquire image from most different image sources, such as image-files and videos, all common camera types, but also from network streams. In combination with ICL’s program argument evaluation framework, you can very easily develop applications that are able to grab images from all supported image sources.
Simple and easy-to-use C++-interface¶
Object-orientated programming (OOP) in C++ provides both, high performance due to processor-close programming, as well as a high abstraction level, due to the inherent features of object orientation. In particular, inheritance, data/function encapsulation, as well as function- and class-templating are used for ICL’s implementation. However, ICL does only use complex template structures where it is absolutely necessary, which will particularly appreciated by medium skilled C++-programmers.
No compulsory software dependencies¶
All external software dependencies are purely optional. Therefore, ICL’s image structures and a large set of it’s functions and classes can be used without having to install a large set of 3rd-party libraries. By these means, you can develop your image processing algorithms with a slim version of ICL and link your code against a full featured ICL afterwards, i.e., to use a certain camera type.
Powerful GUI integration¶
Creating graphical user interfaces is a fundamental part of the development of interactive computer vision applications. Unlike the OpenCV-library, we did not only concentrate on providing image-processing-related functions and tools. A fundamental part of ICL’s support functions is it’s GUI-creation toolkit, that allows for creating and layouting most complex and interactive graphical user interfaces within only a few lines of code.
