web application image processing

Question

I'm writing a web application whose sole intention is to process the images provided by the user.

I do understand that a multitude of programming languages facilitate server-side image manipulation and some basic functionality etc., but my concern here is which might be the best programming language/ libraries for exhaustive image processing ?

I'm currently planning to do the web application/user-interface in any of the languages i.e. PHP/ Python and delegate all the image-manipulation work to a dedicated server, with my application logic written in c/c++.

thanks in advance

Answer 1

For Python, look at PIL which is very powerful image processing library.

Python/PIL is certainly a very good candidate for your application

Answer 2

Well the image processing part in server side scripting languages is usually always done by bindings to a native C/C++ library or by directly calling a command line image maniuplation tool. One library to use e.g. for PHP would be imagick. Even though use server side image processing carefully, because it is still very resource consuming.

Answer 3

Have a look at ImageMagick and gd. They have bindings to a lot of higher level languages, and provide good performance because they are written in C.

Answer 4

Image Magick is a good choice for standard stuff like image scaling/cropping and some more basic image manipulations. If you are into more sophisticated image-processing or higher level computer vision tasks like face detection I would recommend OpenCV which is a c++ library meant for running realtime tasks.