Can you provide some additional context on the use of the software? I.e. are you planning to use the software as part of some industrial machine vision / AI technology setting? Or, are you needing the image processing software for some other use?
- There is not just one size fits all software so it all depends on the application.
- There are many code algorithms languages so if you are concern about algorithm processing time, no worry there, in this day and age computing / processing power not a concern.
You can use Matlab in all parts of image processing projec. As an imporetant aspect of Matlab I can mention SPM that is a ready pipeline for preprocessing and volume extraction which is runed in the Matlab.
I think, Matlab R2017b will be a very good software to analyze as it's image processing tool is very powerful and you can integrate different machine learning tools. ... The ImageJ software may also be an option. It is free and open source, and has rather intuitive GUI. A large collection of plugins is also available.