Re Has any made the switch from matlab to scilab or other open

Re: Has any made the switch from matlab to scilab (or other open source)?

Bryan Heit wrote:
...
> I was wondering if anyone has made the switch to scilab, or another
> open source package, for this type of processing?  Can it be done
> without significant down time, and is it worth it?
> 
> Any insights anyone has, even if it isn't image processing specific,
> would be greatly appreciated.

Never used matlab, but try a matlab group.
comp.soft-sys.matlab for example.

-- 
Regards,
Martin Leese
E-mail: please@see.Web.for.e-mail.INVALID
Web: http://members.tripod.com/martin_leese/

Re: Has any made the switch from matlab to scilab (or other open source)?

I am a matlab user and I have considered doing the same. I studied
some of the open source packages and you might consider Octave and
python. I have used some Octave functions that I ported to matlab and
they worked fine. Python has a very active user community with lots of
user-contributed software available.

Let us know your conclusions.

Re: Has any made the switch from matlab to scilab (or other open source)?

I am working in Face recognition project. Initial Frame work I did in
Matlab. After that I changed the code to OpenCV.  OpenCV is having all
the basic image processing tools.  It is very easy to learn also

Re: Has any made the switch from matlab to scilab (or other open source)?

On Sep 25, 2:55=A0pm, Bryan Heit  wrote:
> Thanx everyone for you reply. =A0I'll repost this on the matlab group,
> but it sounds like this may be a bust...
>
> Bryan
----------------------------------------
Bryan:
Don't expect much sympathy or help there.  This topic generally comes
up about once a year there -- people name a few packages and lots of
people bash them and point out their deficiencies, even though
everyone there knows that MATLAB has it's quirks and limitations (such
as no user interface for image processing functions, just command line
interface, and a lousy dialog box editor program).
Regards,
ImageAnalyst

Re: Has any made the switch from matlab to scilab (or other open source)?

On Sep 26, 1:17=A0am, ImageAnalyst  wrote:
> On Sep 25, 2:55=A0pm, Bryan Heit  wrote:> Tha=
nx everyone for you reply. =A0I'll repost this on the matlab group,
> > but it sounds like this may be a bust...
>
> > Bryan
>
> ----------------------------------------
> Bryan:
> Don't expect much sympathy or help there. =A0This topic generally comes
> up about once a year there -- people name a few packages and lots of
> people bash them and point out their deficiencies, even though
> everyone there knows that MATLAB has it's quirks and limitations (such
> as no user interface for image processing functions, just command line
> interface, and a lousy dialog box editor program).

Yeah, but bad as that is, the alternatives, although free, are more or
less unusable, sad to say.

illywhacker;

Re: Has any made the switch from matlab to scilab (or other open source)?

On Oct 9, 1:35=A0pm, bolme  wrote:
> Bryan,
>
> I am also a little late. =A0I have been very happy with python/scipy. =A0=
I
> switched to python about 5 years ago and I have been very happy with
> it. =A0I have found that scipy can handle about 95% of the features that
> I appreciated from matlab and many of the functions even have the same
> name and similar interface. =A0Python was also pretty easy to learn. =A0A
> year ago I tried matlab again and decided that I did not want to go
> back.
>
> Another benefit of python is that the language is well developed and
> is much more general purpose than matlab. =A0For example you can build
> large object oriented systems with python that would not be possible
> with matlab, and you have access to a huge library of tools that you
> can use to easily solve many problems. =A0I have also found that python
> has interfaces to many computer vision and machine learning libraries
> that I use in my research.
>
> The disadvantages of python is that it is not a "research language"
> and it does not have the same commercial support as matlab. =A0This
> means that there is not a clean nice gui, the plotting functions are
> not as good, and it does not have as many specialized toolboxes and
> functions as matlab.
>
> I gave a talk summarizing computer vision toolkits a few weeks ago and
> it included python and matlab. =A0Slides can be found here:https://www.cs=
.colostate.edu/wiki/mediawiki/images/e/ef/CVToolsv2.pdf
>
> Hope this helps,
> Dave
> ---http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~bolme

I generally agree with many of the points-of-view here, and there are
good and bad things about both commercial or open source.

My biggest problem with MATLAB is that you cannot get to any kind of
real working software once you've finished the prototyping... so, if I
want to give a tool to a colleague or associate or customer or partner
or anyone who does not have a MATLAB license, they cannot do anything
with it unless they have a working copy of MATLAB.

I've found that it pays to look out for tools that you need
specifically. Yes, MATLAB has some great built-in toolkits and you can
get a lot of code from other users, but that is true of many,many open
source packages.

Eventually, it boils down to one's own comfort level...I can imagine
that Mathworks has, by a big margin, more developers, testers,
documentation makers, evangelists, and support personnel than any one
open source project.

So it is a matter of time, but it is a chicken-and-egg, don't be
afraid to look out there for other alternatives to MATLAB... for most
researchers, MATLAB was what they were told to use in school, it was
the tool they learned, and probably the only environment they are
comfortable in, so if you ask them to switch, many will complain very
loudly.

If you want to change that, suggest using an alternative tool in the
undergraduate courses... :-) Most universities get into the special
low-priced student licensing offered by Mathworks... maybe not now,
but in a few years, there could be some real choices, even for those
addicted to MATLAB!

Best Regards,
Milind Joshi
IDEA TECHNOSOFT INC.
http://www.ideatechnosoft.com