Image processing libraries in python

Thomas Jollans tjol at tjol.eu
Fri Sep 14 13:57:03 EDT 2018


On 14/09/18 19:04, tejaswi wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> I was looking to work with images in python. I saw two packages
> related to this, Pillow and scipy.ndimage.  I was wondering what
> purposes each of these serve.
> I've previously used matlab/octave's image processing facilities and
> found them quite easy to work with, so is scipy the way to go in that
> case.
> Thank you,
> Tejaswi D Prakash
Pillow is great for simple image processing. Converting between formats, 
resizing, cropping, rotating. simple filters - that kind of thing. The 
kind of thing you might otherwise do with GIMP, you might say.

For more in-depth image analysis, scipy.ndimage and scikit-image are 
your friends. Obviously they work better with the numpy/scipy ecosystem.

And, as MRAB points out, there's also OpenCV, which is fantastic for 
certain types of problems (have a look at the docs). For some fields 
(e.g. astronomy) there are also more specialized packages that may help.

In short, if you images are pictures, have a look at Pillow. If your 
images are data, have a look at scikit-image, scipy.ndimage, and maybe 
more specialized packages like OpenCV or astropy.

-- Thomas



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