Challenging image acquisition and processing problems are rarely solved with standard procedures. More often, you require flexible software that enables you to experiment with ideas, analyse results and design real-world solutions. This presentation describes how MATLAB, the Image Processing Toolbox and the Image Acquisition Toolbox provide a complete environment for image acquisition, analysis, processing, visualization and algorithm development. Through product demonstrations, the presentation explains how to: connect to and configure image acquisition hardware from MATLAB; organize and manipulate image data for exploration and visualization; execute standard algorithms for enhancement, segmentation, morphology and feature measurement; and develop algorithms using the MATLAB environment.