I am about to start a project in visual image-processing and have no had experience with Matlab, Aforge, OpenCV and was wondering if anyone had any experiences with these different software packages.

I was also wondering which of the three packages were most efficient I assume OpenCV but has anyone had any experience? 

The question you need to ask yourself is which is more important - your time or the computer's time. If your task is really simple, you may be able to code it up in MATLAB and have it work right off the bat. MATLAB is by far the easiest for development - a scripted language with built-in memory management, a huge array of provided functions, and a great interface for displaying and manipulating data while debugging.

On the other hand, MATLAB is at least an order of magnitude slower than compiled openCV code for many tasks. This is especially true if you use the intel performance primitives libraries.

If you know how to code in MATLAB, I would suggest writing and debugging your algorithms in that language, then porting them to c/c++ with openCV for speed. If there are only a couple of simple functions that you need to speed up, you can call c code from MATLAB, but it's hard to get this working right the first few times you try it, so you're probably better off just rewriting your finished code entirely in c/c++