Is MATLAB more powerful than specialized image processing softwares ?

I am a beginner in image processing.My question is - There are many specialized image processing softwares.Is MATLAB better than them?(Why MATLAB is used instead of them for image processing?) Also,is MATLAB able to provide ALL(or ALMOST ALL) facilities provided by those softwares?

Answer 1

[Andreas Goser]

It is difficult to assess "better" or "more powerful", but I can describe some of the benefits I experienced myself and hear from users.

• One aspect of "canned software" ("specialized" in your words) is you do not know how exactly they work. When it is about publication of scientific papers, you are typically expected to refer to the algorithm you used. In MATLAB, you can see in most cases source code or references to papers / text books.
• Often you cannot change algorithms. In my experience in image processing, you often have an algorithm being very close to what you need, but need to be flexible for handling special situation. In MATLAB you have this flexibilty.

[Andreas Goser]

I am not sure what you mean with "provide all facilities". Can you elaborate?

[Sagar Damle]

What I mean by 'Facilities' is,for example,

1.removing black spots on face of a human

2.changing background colour of a photograph(blue to white or some other colour)

3.merging two photographs

4.adding some text in the photograph(in case of a birthday-photo,adding "Happy Birthday!" in the photo having desired size,font,style).

In short,I mean to point out the facilities provided by digital studios by the word 'facilities'.Is 'Photoshop' more handy for those applications ?

[Joseph Cheng]

Well it all depends on what you want to do. If you're looking for the list above which looks to be graphic design, personal use, and/or image manipulation. Matlab is probably the most expensive option. I think we were all thinking you were looking for Image Analysis tools (histograms, OCR, filtering, Image analysis, eye detection, facial recognition, etc.) and not Photo manipulation.

For what you listed image software like Adobe Photoshop or even GIMP will be (cheaper and free) compared to Matlab. Not to say Matlab cannot do it but it may be overkill and to the level of pixel manipulation than you really need to do. All the listed stuff can be done in MSpaint (albeit probably really tedious to do so).

Again it all goes to what you need it to do.

• Are you just looking to manipulate some images?

or

• do you need to develop algorithms or methods to do these things?

The latter would probably be where you'd need to go the Matlab route