The 

Image interface was also customized for C++, Python, R, Java and C# to provide
additional syntactic enhancements to make language integration as easy as possible.
These enhancements include features such as operator overloading, advance
subscripting, and utilizing weak typing of return values in many scripting languages.

The resulting image class provides a simple and easy to use interface that fully
encapsulates the complexities of ITK. Among the things that are hidden include
templates for both the image dimension and pixel type as well as multiple image classes.
Details such as smart-pointers, memory management and copy semantics are also
removed and replace with a straightforward C++ interface. This standard interface can
be directly wrapped by SWIG, thus providing a conventional interface for different
target languages.