libopenraw is an ongoing project to provide a free software implementation 
for camera RAW files decoding. One of the main reasons is that dcraw is not 
suited for easy integration into applications, and there is a need for an 
easy to use API to build free software digital image processing applications.

It also has the goal to address missing features of dcraw like meta-data 
decoding and easy thumbnail extraction.

libopenraw requires boost (also available at SlackBuilds.org).