We've written programs using number of different image processing systems to load a TIFF image, crop 100 pixels off every edge, shrink by 10% with bilinear interpolation, sharpen with a 3x3 convolution and save again. It's a trivial test but it does give some idea of the speed and memory behaviour of these libraries (and it's also quite fun to compare the code).

There's a driver program -- run

./benchmark.sh

to generate the test image and run all the benchmarks.

The program is very simple and doesn't do much error checking. You'll need to look through the output and make sure everything is working correctly. In particular, make sure you have all the packages installed. On Ubuntu, you can do this by running

sudo apt-get install imagemagick graphicsmagick libopencv-dev \
	python-imaging netpbm libvips nip2 libfreeimage-dev \
	exactimage

gem install rmagick ruby-vips

There's stuff here to test imagescience as well, but it's not installing for me for some reason. It might work for you:

gem install image_science

You may need more recent versions of some packages. The netpbm in Ubuntu is very old and installing from the website is a good idea. Ubuntu libvips tends to lag as well.

The speed and memory use page on the libvips website has a table of results.

The peakmem.pl program doesn't seem to be working correctly, investigate.

The Octave test (vips.m) segvs for me on Ubuntu 13.04, try again later.

why is vips-cc faster than vips-c? vips-c is spending 40ms in startup, but we see a speed difference of 100ms ... they must be running different pipelines