Introduction

Gandalf is a C library designed to support the development of computer vision applications. For installation instructions see the INSTALL file provided with the distribution. Gandalf is divided into the following packages:-

• The Common package contains general purpose tools used by other packages. It includes routines for memory allocation, linked lists, various numerical functions, array manipulations and error handling.
• The Linear algebra package includes vector/matrix manipulation routines both for small objects (sizes 2,3,4) and general size vectors & matrices. The latter optionally employs LAPACK for certain operations, where a fast implementation of LAPACK is available.
• The Image package contains low-level image creation and manipulation functions, supporting grey-level, RGB colour images with or without alpha channels, with various different pixel depths. 2D and 3D vector field images are also supported.
• The Vision package contains some useful vision utility modules, including edge/line/corner feature detection, and geometrical fitting routines.

In the following chapters we introduce each package in turn, describing the scope and applications of the package, followed by tutorial examples showing how to build a user application using Gandalf. This is followed by chapter 6 describing the testing framework used by Gandalf. Firstly we describe the conventions and style of Gandalf.