GSoC 2013: done with ImageIO - please test (update #5)
The imageIO section of the original project was much shorter than this. Originally it was limited to implement imformats, and then expand it to do the writing and reading of multipage images in a Matlab compatible way which is just implementing the options Index and Frames in imread, and WriteMode in imwrite. The date of that last commit was 16th of July. However, I didn't stop there and tried to fix other incompatibilities with Matlab and add new options.
Here's a list of the main changes:
- dealing with transparency: alpha channel is now returned as the third output of imread and only accepted with the Alpha option of imwrite. Previously, the alpha channel would be considered the 2nd or 4th element on the 3rd dimension for grayscale and RGB images respectively. This prevented the distinction between a RGB with transparency and a CMYK image. Also, since GraphicsMagick has the transparency values inverted from most other applications (Matlab inclusive), we were doing the same. This has been fixed.
- CMYK images: implemented reading and writing of images in the CMYK colorspace.
- imread options: in addition to Index and Frames, also implemented PixelRegion, which may speedup reading when only parts of the image are of interest, and Info, for compatibility only, which doesn't have any effect at the moment.
- imwrite options: in addition to WriteMode, implemented Alpha (as mentioned above).
- indexed images: implement writing of indexed images. Previously, indexed images would be converted to RGB which would then be saved. An indexed image will now always return indexes independently if a colormap was requested as output (previously, a raster image would be returned in such cases).
- floating point and int32 images: GraphicsMagick is integer exclusively and we can't differentiate between an image saved with int32 or floating point. Since the latter are far more common Octave will now return a floating point image when GraphicsMagick reports a bitdepth of 32. Previously, images with more than a reported bitdepth of 16 would not be read at all (note that this is dependent on the GM build options. If GM's quantum depth was 16 or 8, the most common, GM would report a file with 32 bitdepth with the quantum depth it was built with so it would read files with a bitdepth of 32 as long as it was not built with quantum depth 32).
- bitdepth: imread now returns the actual bitdepth of the image in the file rather than trying to optimize it. This is still not perfect but we're making a better guess at it than before (this should be very simple but with GraphicsMagick it's not).
- imfinfo: some new fields, specially reading of Exif and GPS data which allowed to deprecate readexif in the image package.
In the end, I recognize that there's some incompatibilities left to fix but I don't know how anymore. As I mentioned on my previous post, GraphicsMagick is too smart for our use. I predict that we will eventually have to move to something different, if for nothing else, to read and write floating point images without trouble. I only had a quick glance on alternatives but FreeImage would seem like a good bet. Of course, there's also the possibility to write our library wrapper around the format specific libraries.
Would be nice if users could throw some images to imread and imwrite and report any bugs. I'm specially afraid of regressions since there was so much stuff changed and we don't really have tests for these functions yet.