imager: an R package for image processing based on CImg

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

R is a language designed for the processing of (numerical) data, and images are just numerical data.The original motivation for developing imager was that existing image processing facilities in R were at the time rather limited, and that R had the potential to be a great environment for processing image data.Many scientists now use R as their primary computing environment, and some amount of image processing is a requirement in fields like biology (when microscopy is used), or astronomy.