OpenCV has quite good performance. It should be sufficient for most cases.
To improve performance, you can also use OpenCV together with Intel IPP, which is however a non-free commercial product. If OpenCV detects that IPP is installed it will use it where possible.
As a third option you can use IPP directly. IPP was designed with high performance (on Intel architectures) as a goal. It is optimized to use the intel SIMD instructions.
Answer from Dani van der Meer on Stack Overflow Top answer 1 of 11
14
OpenCV has quite good performance. It should be sufficient for most cases.
To improve performance, you can also use OpenCV together with Intel IPP, which is however a non-free commercial product. If OpenCV detects that IPP is installed it will use it where possible.
As a third option you can use IPP directly. IPP was designed with high performance (on Intel architectures) as a goal. It is optimized to use the intel SIMD instructions.
2 of 11
10
imagemagick is quite popular.
Cimg
cimg.eu
The CImg Library - C++ Template Image Processing Library
The Library is a small and open-source C++ library for image processing, designed with these properties in mind :
C++ Image Processing Libraries - Stack Overflow
I am looking for a C++ library for image processing. I need the library to threshold a PPM photo (color photo). Should I write my own code? what do you guys think? More on stackoverflow.com
Real-time image processing library that isn't actually C++?
In no particular order: libvips sod zimg FFmpeg More on reddit.com
32
43
March 15, 2020Resources to learn C for image processing and computer vision
OpenCV's Python API is very similar to its C API. You could learn C properly then start using OpenCV without much hassle. Be aware, I said you have to learn C properly. It is very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C than any other language because the safeguards you expect to be there is never there. I you don't learn it properly, you'll spend more time debugging why your program is crashing in a place it never should crash than spend time how you should approach to image processing. More on reddit.com
14
62
October 19, 2020Any simple image libraries for C#?
Big fan of Magick.NET , a .net port of ImageMagick More on reddit.com
22
10
July 20, 2023Videos
32:30
C++ and Qt Tutorial: Image Processing Application! - YouTube
37:12
C++ Image Programming From Scratch - 4.1 - YouTube
18:59
Image Processing with C++: Ep. 1 - Setup - YouTube
33:31
Let's do a little image processing in C - YouTube
02:21:06
C Programming: Image manipulations with arrays - YouTube
14:10
Image Processing With C++ Ep.9 - Overlaying Text On Images - YouTube
Quora
quora.com › What-are-the-best-libraries-for-image-processing-in-C
What are the best libraries for image processing in C? - Quora
Answer (1 of 2): You asked for an image processing library in C (not C++). I assume this is by intention. You also asked for the best library. Let me first say some words about the latter. It’s only possible to assess which library is the best if the functional and preformance requirements and al...
University of Edinburgh
homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk › rbf › BOOKS › PHILLIPS › cips2ed.pdf pdf
Image Processing in C Second Edition Dwayne Phillips
this text may be copied without the written permission of Dwayne Phillips. If you have purchased the electronic edition of this text, you may print a ... This book is a tutorial on image processing.
SourceForge
sourceforge.net › home › open source software › multimedia › graphics › image processing › image processing libraries
Best Open Source C Image Processing Libraries for Mac
It implements operations such as color space conversions, noise removal, enhancement, morphology, edge detection, thresholding, segmentation, and visual feature extraction ... The Image Processing Library 98 (IPL98) is a platform independent image C/C++ library.
Epixinc
epixinc.com › products › pxipl.htm
PXIPL™ Image Processing Library
The PXIPL Library empowers C/C++ and Windows programmers to process and analyze images in conjunction with:
SourceForge
camellia.sourceforge.net
Camellia Image Processing and Computer Vision library
The Camellia Library is an open source Image Processing & Computer Vision library. Written in plain C, it is cross-platform (Unix / Linux, Windows) and robust.
Top answer 1 of 7
15
Magick++ might help. It's the library version of ImageMagick.
2 of 7
13
All of the above options should be able to do what you required.
I would like to add OpenCV to the list. It's a fast cross-platform computer vision library with extensive image loading, saving and processing support. It's written in C, but it has a solid C++ interface, which I have used in the past.
That being said: Reading / writing PPMs is straight-forward, so if all you need is to read and threshold, you should definitely consider doing it yourself. It would come down to reading the PPM bytes into memory, greyscaling by averaging the RGB color channels (note that averaging the RGB channels is one, very simple, method to greyscale; there are more), then thresholding and writing away.
Reddit
reddit.com › r/c_programming › real-time image processing library that isn't actually c++?
r/C_Programming on Reddit: Real-time image processing library that isn't actually C++?
March 15, 2020 -
I'm looking for a real-time image processing library which must be written in C for portability, but anything I search for brings only C++ up, unsurprisingly.
It cannot be written in anything else and simply use a C interface.
Ermig1979
ermig1979.github.io › Simd
Simd Library
The Simd Library is a free open source image processing and machine learning library, designed for C and C++ programmers. It provides many useful high performance algorithms for image processing such as: image loading and saving, pixel format conversion, image scaling and filtration, extraction ...
FileFormat
products.fileformat.com › image › libgd
C Image Processing Library – Generate & Crop, Flip or Rotate Images
October 2, 2025 - LibGD - open Source C image processing library enables software professionals to generate & modify images. You can also Crop, Flip or Rotate Images via C APIs.
OpenCV
opencv.org › home
OpenCV - Open Computer Vision Library
February 9, 2021 - The world’s largest Computer Vision library meets the world’s top-rated Face Recognition technology.Learn More ... OpenCV is open source, contains over 2500 algorithms, and is operated by the non-profit Open Source Vision Foundation. Since June 2000. ... Explore OpenCV's market-leading Computer Vision solutions.
GitHub
github.com › matt-42 › vpp
GitHub - matt-42/vpp: Video++, a C++14 high performance video and image processing library.
Video++, a C++14 high performance video and image processing library. - matt-42/vpp
Starred by 733 users
Forked by 113 users
Languages C++ 98.4% | C++ 98.4%
Springer
link.springer.com › home › reproducible research in pattern recognition › conference paper
An Image Processing Library in Modern C++: Getting Simplicity and Efficiency with Generic Programming | SpringerLink
June 29, 2019 - Comparison of the implementations of a polymorphic routine with the object-oriented programming and generic programming paradigms ... Run-time polymorphism offers a greater flexibility in dynamic environment, where the types of the image to handle are not known until the execution of the program. For example, scipy.ndimage, a python image processsing library for interactive environments, uses a C-stylished version of the iterator abstraction [28] and value abstraction given above (C-style stands for an hand-made switch dispatch instead of virtual methods).
LinuxQuestions.org
linuxquestions.org › questions › linux-newbie-8 › c-language-image-processing-library-591108
C Language Image Processing Library
October 11, 2007 - I need a C Language imagage processing library of functions that will convert my results to selected image formats. Where can I find such libraries? I
GitHub
github.com › helyousfi › Image-Processing-Library-in-C
GitHub - helyousfi/Image-Processing-Library-in-C: This repository contains a collection of C algorithms designed for advanced signal and image processing tasks, including filtering, rotating, cropping, denoising, and more.
This project is a C-based image processing library that provides various functions to manipulate and analyze images. The library includes functionalities for extracting image areas, reducing colors, applying filters, and performing convolutions.
Author helyousfi
GitHub
github.com › libvips › libvips
GitHub - libvips/libvips: A fast image processing library with low memory needs. · GitHub
A fast image processing library with low memory needs. - libvips/libvips
Starred by 11.3K users
Forked by 758 users
Languages C 85.7% | C++ 9.4% | Python 3.5%
Medium
medium.com › imagescv › top-9-open-source-c-computer-vision-libraries-6690d860627b
Top 9 Open-Source C++ Computer Vision Libraries | by Yaniv Noema | imagescv | Medium
January 10, 2022 - VIGRA is a cross-platform C++ computer vision library for image processing and computer vision algorithms.
GitHub
github.com › GreycLab › CImg
GitHub - GreycLab/CImg: The CImg Library is a small and open-source C++ toolkit for image processing · GitHub
The CImg Library is a small and open-source C++ toolkit for image processing - GreycLab/CImg
Starred by 1.7K users
Forked by 301 users
Languages C++ 60.6% | C 31.6% | JavaScript 5.8% | HTML 1.2% | CSS 0.6% | Shell 0.1%
Libhunt
cpp.libhunt.com › libs › image-processing
C++ Image Processing libraries | LibHunt
High-quality pro HDR image resizing / scaling C++ library, including a very fast, precise, SIMD Lanczos resizer (header-only C++) ... DISCONTINUED. An image processing and conversion library to load, save, display, transform BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX, TGA, WMF, WBMP, JBG, J2K images.