[SciPy-user] fromimage returns instance instead of numpy array

[Stefan van der Walt]

Hi Zachary

On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 11:19:13PM -0400, Zachary Pincus wrote:
> > PIL 1.1.6 is still broken to some extent.  I sent a patch to the Image
> > SIG:
> >
> > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/image-sig/2007-August/004570.html
> >
> > Unfortunately, there was no reaction.
> 
> I sent a very similar patch a while ago, and got similar results  
> (i.e. no response).
> 
> Moreover, the PIL is extremely inconsistent about its handling of 16- 
> bit integer images (important for many scientific uses), and has  
> various byte-swapping bugs for these on little-endian architectures.  
> There was also little interest in my patches about those issues...
> 
> I have for a while been toying with taking the image format parsers  
> (all in pure python) from the PIL and hooking that up to numpy for  
> actually unpacking the bits from the file. (Right now, the PIL uses  
> some custom and occasionally questionable C code to do this.) I've  
> made no progress, but I think it would be possible to do so with not  
> too much fuss. Would there be any interest in something like this?
> 
> My current solution is a fork of PIL that I made, which rips out  
> basically everything except image IO, and for which I fixed the 16- 
> bit image problems and drastically beefed up the numpy compatibility.  
> I'd be happy to send this to anyone who desires, or if there was a  
> specific clamor, make it a scikit or something. Is there any interest  
> regarding that either?

Currently, we have 3 systems involved here:

- scipy.misc.pilutil
- scipy.ndimage
- PIL

Jarrod Millman mentioned that they will soon start a rewrite/major
refactoring of ndimage.  I think we should merge all the image
processing and I/O abilities currently available in scipy into the new
package.  Ndimage was written before numpy reached 1.0, and duplicates
a lot of functionality that can now be written in Python.  Converting
the code from C to Python will certainly lessen the burden on
developers.

I hope that your code finds it way into the new ndimage (it may help
if you make the patches available now, already -- or if you write a
wiki page about the deficiencies you noticed).  I'm keeping my eyes
open, and hope to see some more messages on the topic from the nipy
guys.

Cheers
Stéfan