skeletonize question

[Zachary Pincus]

On Dec 13, 2011, at 5:23 AM, Thouis (Ray) Jones wrote:
> 2011/12/13 Stéfan van der Walt <stefan at sun.ac.za>:
>> I am glad you showed me this example, because it also pointed out a
>> problem with paletted image reading in PIL.  I'm seriously considering
>> just making matplotlib our default backend (except that they also have
>> a PNG reading bug in older versions where images are flipped upside
>> down!).
> 
> Having fought this fight far too many times, I'm beginning to think
> there's a need for a simple, small, and fast python module wrapping
> libtiff, libpng, and libjpeg and talking to numpy.  This would handle
> 90% or more of everyone's needs and would hopefully be simpler to
> install and use than PIL (and would have a faster development cycle).
> 
> Ray Jones

That's why I wrote that FreeImage backend... But maybe asking people to get libfreeimage (lightweight and dependency-free as it may be) is harder than ensuring they have libs tiff, png, and jpeg?

There are win32 DLLs available for FreeImage, but no pre-built binaries for OS X, and I don't know if many/any/all linux distros provide packages for FreeImage. Does anyone know this? Similarly, I'm not sure what the licensing issues would be for providing pre-built FreeImage libraries -- FreeImage is GPL (v2), not LGPL, and so I don't actually know whether that means pre-build FreeImage libs can be distributed with skimage or not.

Zach