Halide – a language for image processing and computational photography
From the website:
Halide is a new programming language designed to make it easier to write high-performance image processing code on modern machines. Its current front end is an embedding in C++. Hardware targets include x86-64/SSE, ARM v7/NEON, and CUDA.
If you need a reason to learn C++, this could be it.
I first pointed to Halide at: Halide Wins Image Processing Gold Medal!.