November 13, 1997, Montreal, Canada - The Matrox Imaging Products Group, a leader and innovator in providing PC hardware and software development tools to OEMs, system integrators and professional end-users, today announced ActiveMIL-Lite 1.0, a collection of ActiveX controls (OCXs) for building Windows-based scientific, industrial and other imaging applications using rapid application development (RAD) tools.

In a world where time-to-market means everything, more and more developers of vision systems are discovering the benefits of working with RAD tools like Microsoft Visual Basic and ActiveX controls like ActiveMIL-Lite. They spend less time designing graphical user interfaces, leaving more time for application development of systems in areas like picture archiving and retrieval, security/identification, industrial inspection, and medical visualization. Programming time and effort is reduced or replaced altogether. While RAD tools have been around for a while, the ActiveX controls for quickly creating vision/imaging applications using today's advanced PC hardware have been few. To create these applications, developers simply drag-and-drop ActiveX controls from a toolbar onto a work space. Through a series of mouse clicks, developers can quickly configure an application for image capture and display, selecting frame grabber settings from tab menus instead of coding. Additional time saving and convenience features let programmers quickly and easily develop the core control code.

ActiveMIL-Lite is a new addition to the ActiveX world. It is the key that unlocks the door to reduced application development efforts. This collection of ActiveX controls for image capture, transfer, and display using Matrox frame grabbers and image processors, fully integrates into RAD environments and gives developers access to the algorithms of the field-proven Matrox Imaging Library. Now, developers who want to use award-winning Matrox imaging hardware in vision and imaging systems can point-and-click their way to building robust applications.

ActiveMIL-Lite is the initial result of a two-phase plan to implement the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) of high-level 'C' functions as ActiveX controls. Based on a subset of MIL called MIL-Lite 5.1, ActiveMIL-Lite 1.0 inherits all the features and functionality that 'C' programmers have come to appreciate when using MIL-Lite, such as video window tracking and the freedom to use existing and future Matrox imaging hardware with little or no rewriting of code.

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