Sharp-eyed readers of my previous post might have noticed the "Published with MATLAB^® 7.5" footer at the end of the example. That's right, as Loren posted earlier this week, R2007b is now traveling the world via plane, truck, and TCP/IP.

The new version of MATLAB is 7.5. Follow this link for the full release notes. Some of the new MATLAB features and enhancements might be of particular interest to readers of this blog:

• Reading TIFF files using imread has been significantly enhanced. imread now supports reading TIFF files with JPEG, LZW, and Deflate compression. It also now supports any number of samples per pixel and bits per sample. And memory use has been greatly reduced when you use the 'PixelRegion' parameter to read in a subset of a TIFF file.
• A new mmreader video file reader object for Windows platforms supports formats such as AVI, MPEG, and WMV, and adds the ability to read additional video codecs that aviread does not support.
• You can now make and operate on much larger arrays if you have sufficient memory and are running on a 64-bit OS. Previously, arrays were limited to 2³¹ - 2 elements. [Updated September 11, 2007] The new limit is 2⁴⁸ - 1.

Here are some other enhancements in the new MATLAB release that happened to catch my eye:

• On Windows and Macintosh, fonts in the MATLAB Desktop are now antialiased according to system settings. It looks a lot better on my LCD monitor!
• The editor supports code folding. Using this feature you can collapse and expand subfunctions and their associated help.
• You can set the number of computational threads programmatically using maxNumComputationalThreads.
• There are several incremental improvements to marking up text in cells, such as using HTML and LaTeX markup. (I like these improvements a lot, since I regularly use publish to generate posts for this blog.)
• mlint can now show you the McCabe complexity metric for functions in your M-files. I have sometimes called this the "magic metric," and our team regularly uses it to improve the quality of our code. I talked about this metric in a presentation I gave last year at the International Conference on Image Processing. See pages 32-36 of my presentation for more information.

There are lots more. I encourage you to skim the release notes to discover which other features interest you.

R2007b also includes major new updates of Image Processing Toolbox and Image Acquisition Toolbox, as well a minor update of Video and Image Processing Blockset. I'll write about these releases a little later.

Enjoy!