One of the primary purposes of the CVIPtools development is to allow students, faculty, and other researchers to explore the power of computer processing of digital images.

The new Windows version of CVIPtools, developed at the Computer Vision and Image Processing Laboratory here at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, under the continuing direction of Dr. Scott E Umbaugh , is currently available with the new textbook, Computer Imaging: Digital Image Analysis and Processing. CVIPtools 4.x is implemented in four layers: the algorithms code layer, the Common Object Module (COM) interface layer, the CVIPimage layer, and the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The algorithms code layer is based primarily on previous versions of CVIPtools, consists of all image and data processing procedures and functions, and is written in standard C. The COM interface layer is written in C++ and links the CVIPtools C functions to the GUI through the CVIPimage Class. The CVIPimage layer provides an object-oriented paradigm by using the Class CVIPimage to consolidate data safety and memory management. The GUI layer, written in Visual Basic, implements the image queue, viewer, and manages user input and output. For development, CVIPtools4.x includes the CVIPlab environment and the CVIPtools libraries. In addition to the standard C libraries, a dynamically linked library (cviptools.dll) is provided that contains all the COM versions of these functions.

CVIPtools version 3.9 is a UNIX/Win32-based software package and is a collection of computer imaging tools providing services to the users at three layers. At the bottom level are the CVIPtools libraries (the application programming interface). Based on the CVIPtools libraries are the cviptcl and cvipwish shells. The cviptcl shell is an extension of Tcl with additional CVIP capabilities. With cviptcl, the user can either use the command line for interactive image processing, or write cviptcl shell scripts for batch processing. The cvipwish shell is the extension of cviptcl with the added functionality for building a graphical user interface (GUI). On the top of CVIPtools is the CVIPtools GUI (see screen snapshots) which allows even the casual computer users to experiment with many of the sophisticated tools available to computer imaging specialists without the need for any knowledge of computer programming.

CVIPtools3.9 supports various flavors of UNIX as well as Windows NT/95/98/2000/Me. Version 3.7 is also available which supports more UNIX flavors. You can download the precompiled executables only (bin), executables and libraries (lib), or the source (src). All tar files include the documentation and installation programs.