At the International Conference on Image Processing last week, almost everyone who visited the MathWorks booth was already a MATLAB user. Mostly, they wanted to know "What's new?"

That question is a bit harder to answer than it used to be, because for the past three and a half years we've been releasing product line updates every March and September. Some users have the latest release, and some are still using versions that are several years old. So when someone asked me "What's new?", I usually started my response with "Do you know what version you are using now?"

The R2007b release includes a major update (version 6.0) of the Image Processing Toolbox. Here are some of the enhancements:

• A new image sequence / video viewer that can play a MATLAB movie, AVI file, or multidimensional array.
• Interactive cropping in imtool.
• A Bayer demosaic function.
• A multiresolution pyramid function.
• Better interactive region adjustments for the imcrop, roifill, and roipoly functions.
• New programmable ROI creation functions impoly, imellipse, and imfreehand.
• National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) import.
• High dynamic range (HDR) import and tone mapping.
• Faster performance for bwmorph and imfilter.

But that's just the set of toolbox enhancements in the last six months. How do you know what's new if your version is older than that? Go to the Image Processing Toolbox Release Notes. Click on the "Details" links under the "New Features and Changes" for the previous several releases to get a better idea of what has changed over time.

R2007b also includes a major update (version 3.0) of the Image Acquisition Toolbox. This release adds a new interactive desktop tool for configuring hardware, previewing an acquisition, and acquiring image or video data. The release also adds support for many National Instruments imaging devices.