ExactImage is an image processing library which reimplements 
ImageMagick functions with a significant speed improvement.
The library also provides several new algorithms: lossless JPEG
transforms and creation of searchable PDFs from hOCR annotated 
HTML created with an OCR program such as Tesseract or Cuneiform 
(available at Slackbuilds.org).  There are bindings for PHP, Lua, 
Perl, and Python.  See /usr/doc/exact-image-*/examples/ for 
information on using exactimage with Perl, Python, PHP and Lua.

ExactImage requires agg.  lua and evas are optional dependencies
(both available here at Slackbuilds.org) while bardecode is also 
optional but not available here.