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Well as you go on with this project you will soon find that it takes A LOT of time and effort to write such a thing, and therefore it is likely that your Open Source library is only ever going to support a fraction of the functionality of IVision and you will understand why they didn't make the entire OpenCV API fully accessible in LabVIEW. IVision as it is, is a really large task in itself to accomplish already and contains quite a bit of work to make the OpenCV API work with good performance from LabVIEW. Sure you could go and simply create LabVIEW wrapper VIs for the OpenCV functions directly without any intermediate DLL but you will soon find out that the VIs created in such a way are kind of hard to develop and maintain and the performance of such a solution is likely going to suffer. The LabVIEW ecoverse is kind of small, and while Open Source can and does work in some areas image acquisition is probably not the most likely one. It requires quite a bit of domain knowledge, a very good programming knowledge and a large amount of time to maintain, and all that for a very small user base. Small because the professionals will use IMAQ Vision anyhow, since it is backed up by NI support, semi professional might go for IVision because of the cost, and the poor students will take whatever is there if they can get it for free, but only really do the minimalistic stuff of accessing a webcam and storing an image to disk, with an occasional simple image analysis function if they even have the time and guts to dive into the theory of how to use that.

Well, not really. iVision is a commercial project, what we're making is going to be open source. Besides, strangely enough, they grant much less functionality than IMAQ or OpenCV.