On the complexity of design in imaging software

Recent evidence raised the possibility that algorithm rich software, such as in imaging processing, is more complex than other kinds (Sangwan, 2005). To further investigate this contention a set of complexity metrics were computed for two sets of open source Java software systems. The results suggest that there is little or no difference in software complexity between an imaging application, and "conventional" software, such as a simple database querying system. The tests suggest that the overall complexity of the system depends more on the software design knowledge of the engineers than the kind of system that is constructed.