Development of Computer Graphics and Digital Image Processing Applications on the iPhone

The iPhone is one of the most powerful, complete and versatile portable phones on the market. There are presently more than 150.000 applications available for the iPhone, and its users had downloaded more than three billion applications so far. The iPhone have several capabilities that makes it an interesting platform for the development of applications that use image processing, computer graphics and/or pattern recognition algorithms: it is stable, popular, powerful, flexible and of course portable. What can a developer expect from the platform? What, in practical terms, can be done to implement those types of algorithms, and at what price? This survey paper (written as part of a short course presented at Sibgrapi' 2010) shows some concepts and practical issues on the developing of image processing, computer graphics and pattern recognition applications on the iPhone. Code snippets will be provided, and issues such as memory management, capabilities and limitations will be discussed.