Since an image basically is a matrix Octave is a very powerful environment for processing and analyzing images. To illustrate how easy it is to do image processing in Octave, the following example will load an image, smooth it by a 5-by-5 averaging filter, and compute the gradient of the smoothed image.
I = imread ("myimage.jpg");
S = conv2 (I, ones (5, 5) / 25, "same");
[Dx, Dy] = gradient (S);
In this example S contains the smoothed image, and Dx
and Dy contains the partial spatial derivatives of the image.