VisionX V4 Development Environment.

The V4 system supports two levels of program development: scripts and C programs. An application is formed, in general, by combining a number of V4 commands in a script. C programs perform the computationally intensive image manipulations while the scripts provide a convenient mechanism for constructing applications. A beta version of a python programming development system is available that facilitates limited image processing program development in python. This is mainly intended for rapid algorithm prototyping and validation since a python implementation will be much slower than corresponding C program implementation.

There are over 400 V4 commands available for constructing applications. Many of these commands are, in fact, implemented by scripts. These scripts are written using programming tools for argument parsing and file management that make them indistinguishable from compiled V4 commands.

In order to develop new commands for V4 a basic knowledge of the C programming language and a small number of V4 programming tools is necessary. For the scripts, any scripting language that includes system command execution may be used. For example on Linux these include the standard unix shells (sh, csh, bash, tcsh, etc.), as well as tclsh, perl, and python.