Gandalf is a computer vision and numerical algorithm library, written in C, which allows you to develop new applications that will be portable and run FAST. Dynamically reconfigurable vector, matrix and image structures allow efficient use of memory. Gandalf has been used to develop the "mokey" motion editing software by Imagineer Systems Ltd, released at IBC'2001 in Amsterdam. Mokey performs automatic inpainting of moving objects over an image sequence, and can also be used to compute an accurate alpha matte or outline of an object.

For more details of mokey click on the mokey logo:

Gandalf is free for use for both research and commercial purpises under the LGPL (Lesser Gnu Public License). Gandalf been used on commercial development contracts in the areas of

• Counterfeit detection
• Camera motion control

Gandalf currently contains four packages:

• Common package of simple structures and routines used by the other packages, such as memory allocation, linked lists and error handling;
• Linear algebra package with a large number of routines for matrix and vector manipulations;
• Image package defining a general purpose image structure and low-level image manipulation routines;
• Vision package containing a number of standard image processing, computer vision and geometrical routines.

The major design features of Gandalf are

1. Efficient use of memory through dynamically reconfigurable structures;
2. Emphasis on support of numerical algorithms, especially optimisation;
3. A very flexible and efficient internal image representation,
4. A comprehensive set of matrix/vector operations, incorporating implicit matrix transpose & inverse, and in-place computation where appropriate;
5. Thread-safe.
6. Exploitation of the computational and compilation speed advantages of C over C++ in reducing the number of layers of abstraction over the raw data, an approach we believe is appropriate for simple objects such as matrices, vectors and images.

The documentation for Gandalf comes in two parts. There is a LaTex tutorial with examples available in HTML (via Latex2html) or as a PDF file. Reference documentation for Gandalf has also been generated using Doxygen, and is available here.

There is a Gandalf FAQ.

Download the Gandalf source distribution from the SourceForge project page for Gandalf.

Contributions to Gandalf are welcomed. You can also become a Gandalf developer. However please conform to the Gandalf coding conventions.