It provides support for image capture, several image file formats and many image processing operations. The most popular file formats are supported: TIFF, BMP, PNG, JPEG, GIF and AVI.
Image representation includes scientific data types (like IEEE floating point data) and attributes (or metadata like GeoTIFF and Exif tags). Animation, video and volumes are supported as image sequences, but there is no digital audio support.
The main goal of the library is to provide a simple API and abstraction of images for scientific applications.
The toolkit API is written in C. The core library source code is implemented in C++ and it is very portable, it can be compiled in Windows and UNIX with no modifications. New image processing operations can be implemented in C or in C++.
IM is free software, can be used for public and commercial applications.