Last week The MathWorks released R2008a, the ninth in a series of six-month releases. (If there's an equinox coming up, look for a new MATLAB^® release!)

Here are some of the highlights especially related to image processing. The Image Processing Toolbox^TM, the Image Acquisition Toolbox^TM, and the Video and Image Processing Blockset^TM all had minor upgrades.

Image Processing Toolbox enhancements include:

• The previous release added the ability to read a high dynamic-range (HDR) image and convert it to RGB. With the new release, you can construct a new high dynamic-range image from multiple exposures and then write it out to an HDR file.
• The regionprops function now supports gray-scale images and measurements.
• You can use imshow to display very large TIFF images using subsampling.
• The ROI tools (imellipse, imfreehand, imline, impoint, impoly, imrect, imroi) have several minor enhancements, including wait and resume methods for using them from a script, as well as the ability to interactively add vertices to an existing polygon ROI.
• You can more easily convert between RGB and CMYK color spaces using makecform and applycform.
• The function iccwrite can create smaller profile files in some cases.
• The function cp2tform supports the new transform types similarity and nonreflective similarity.

Image Acquisition Toolbox enhancements include:

• Hamamatsu hardware support
• National Instruments® RTSI support

And here are some of the Video and Image Processing Blockset enhancements:

• Use of RANSAC or Least Median of Squares algorithms to infer geometric transforms.
• More blocks support multidimensional inputs.

Note: If you are a Simulink® user, then you should really be reading Seth's new Simulink blog!

Finally, here are a couple of enhancements for the MATLAB image format functions:

• The imfinfo function now returns new digital camera information.
• The imwrite function now lets you control how many rows are in each strip when you write a TIFF file.