Introduction page: <http://users.ics.forth.gr/~lourakis/levmar/>
The site provides GPL native ANSI C implementations of the Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm, usable also from C++, Matlab, Perl, Python, Haskell and Tcl and explains their use. Both unconstrained and constrained (under linear equations, inequality and box constraints) Levenberg-Marquardt variants are included. The Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm is an iterative technique that finds a local minimum of a function that is expressed as the sum of squares of nonlinear functions. It has become a standard technique for nonlinear least-squares problems and can be thought of as a combination of steepest descent and the Gauss-Newton method. When the current solution is far from the correct one, the algorithm behaves like a steepest descent method: slow, but guaranteed to converge. When the current solution is close to the correct solution, it becomes a Gauss-Newton method.
