opencv_matlab is a simple C++ template library that provides routines to
convert between Matlab's and OpenCV's primary image representatations.

This way it is possible to easily call OpenCV functions from C++-.mex-code
as well as to use C++ routines developed for Matlab in projects that
primarily use OpenCV.

Naturally, converting images takes time and it's consequently not the best
solution for code with strong time constraints, but it's often more than
good enough for prototyping and/or demonstrators. And, most importantly,
you don't have to rewrite/reimplement code, thus saving hours of time.

I have used the code in several projects and if you want to cite something
(yay!), then [1] might be most appropriate.

[1] B. Schauerte, B. Kühn, K. Kroschel, R. Stiefelhagen, "Multimodal
Saliency-based Attention for Object-based Scene Analysis". In Proc. 24th
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS),
IEEE/RSJ, San Francisco, CA, USA, September 25-30, 2011.