If you look closely at the bottom of my last post, you'll see "Published with MATLAB 7.3" in small gray text. Yep, the R2006b release, including MATLAB 7.3, started shipping on September 1. Here are a few highlights relevant to image processing.

R2006b includes Image Processing Toolbox version 5.3, Image Acquisition Toolbox 2.0, and Video and Image Processing Blockset 2.2. If you work with geospatial data, check out Mapping Toolbox 2.4.

The Image Processing Toolbox update includes DICOM improvements, improved support of version 4 of the International Color Consortium standards, and a "symmetric" option for graycomatrix. (This option makes the function consistent with the Haralick 1973 paper on the subject.)

The Video and Image Processing Blockset update includes a few new blocks (contrast adjustment, demosaic, boundary tracing), some block enhancements, and a bunch of new demos.

The Image Acquisition Toolbox has added Hamamatsu hardware support.

MATLAB 7.3 has quite a few new features. The Image & Geospatial team worked on one in particular: Low-level access to individual routines in the HDF5 C API. If you work with HDF5 files and you need more flexibility than provided by hdf5read, hdf5write, and hdf5info, now you have it.

Enjoy!