[SciPy-User] fromimage/imread segfaults on my images

[Daniel Lenski]

Hi all,
I'm using SciPy to process some sparse binary images with a resolution of 
about 5000x5000 pixels.  I try to load images like this:

  im = Image.open('/tmp/foo.pbm')
  print "Image loaded, size is %s and mode is %s." % (im.size, im.mode)
  arr = fromimage(im)

or

  arr = imread('/tmp/foo.pbm')

In either case, I get a segfault.  The segfault is definitely in the 
SciPy code, rather than the PIL code, since PIL's Image.open runs fine. 

I ran strace, and there's an attempt to mmap() a region as large as the 
image, one byte per pixel, immediately before the segfault:

  mmap(NULL, 21463040, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS,
       -1, 0) = 0x7f278b5be000

The funny thing is... the imread() implementation in pylab *does* work, 
but it converts all images to RGB mode and reverses them vertically for 
no apparent reason.  So I'd rather not use it.  Is this a known bug in 
SciPy?  Any workarounds/fixes?  I don't know any other good, reliable way 
to get a big image into an array :-(

Dan