The Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) is a hardware-independent, modular imaging library.
MIL has been designed for fast application development and ease of use. MIL is capable of running solely with the Host CPU, but can take advantage of specialized acceleration Matrox hardware if it is available and is more efficient. MIL has a completely transparent management system and handles physical objects (such as imaging boards) as virtual objects, allowing for platform-independent applications. MIL uses the notion of systems to identify boards, and more than one board can be controlled by a single application program. MIL allows multiple computers to collaborate across a network, either in a controlling configuration within a single application or in a monitoring configuration between concurrent applications. Both configurations are supported using Distributed MIL.
MIL is a C library intended to be used when writing C/C++ applications. However, by including the provided MIL.NET wrapper in your code, MIL functions are available when writing managed Visual C# and Visual Basic applications. Alternatively, by including the provided MIL Python wrapper, MIL functions are available when writing code in Python language versions 2.7 or 3.4.
MIL comes in a full version, and a version that includes only core functions. The latter is referred to as MIL-Lite.
MIL-Lite allows you to grab, display, archive, transfer, and annotate images. It also allows you to perform some processing operations that are typically useful to preprocess grabbed images.
MIL-Lite can:
Grab up to 16-bit grayscale images, or color images.
Process 1, 8, 16, and 32-bit integer or floating-point grayscale images, depending on the operation.
Process color images, depending on the operation. Each band of a color image is processed individually, one after the other. Basic color processing operations, such as converting color images to grayscale, are supported.
Display 1, 8, or 16-bit grayscale or color images (if the platform supports it).
The full version of MIL expands upon the basic functionality of MIL-Lite and allows you to perform more advanced image processing and analysis. The full version of MIL provides a more extensive set of functions in the image processing module (for example, Fast Fourier or watershed transformations), as well as allowing you to use modules such as: 3D reconstruction, bead analysis, blob analysis, code read/write operations, camera calibration, color analysis, edge finding, measurement, metrology, geometric model finding, pattern matching, character recognition, registration, and string reading.
If the available MIL or MIL-Lite operations do not provide the required functionality, you can use the MIL Function Development module to create your own pseudo-MIL functions (also known as user-defined MIL functions).
The MIL help file refers to both versions of MIL simply as MIL, unless it is necessary to distinguish between them. Note that the Availability button of each function description indicates whether or not it is supported by MIL-Lite.
Please review the MIL Release Notes for information on recent updates before using MIL.