smc.freeimage is a Python interface to the FreeImage and LCMS2 libraries.
FreeImage wraps mature and widely-used libraries like LibJPEG, LibOpenJPEG, LibPNG, LibRaw, LibTIFF4, OpenEXR and zlib in a consistent, well documented and powerful API.
http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/
- Reading of 35 file formats and writing of more than 19 file formats as of FreeImage 3.15.3, including JPEG 2000, multiple subformats of TIFF with G3/G4 fax compression and JPEG subsampling.
- pixel depths from 1-32 bpp standard images up to formats like RGBAF and 2x64complex.
- multi page images
- Metadata (e.g. EXIF, IPTC/NAA, GeoTIFF, XMP) and ICC
- Color adjustment, conversion and channel processing
- Image resizing and rotation
- High Dynamic Range (HDR) image processing and tone mapping
- RAW camera files
Contrary to PIL it doesn't contain advanced image filters or drawing functions. FreeImage focuses on file formats
LCMS2 is a color management engine that implements V2 and V4 ICC profiles up to V4.3. It supports transformation, proofing and introspection of profiles for a large variety of color formats and targets.
smc.freeimage is developed as part of the closed source Visual Library framework.
- mostly written with Cython with some lines of handwritten C Code and some Python helpers.
- fast, it avoids copying large amounts of data and releases the GIL whenever possible.
- 64bit safe, tested on i386/X86 and AMD64/X86_64 systems
- thread safe
- wraps a large subset of FreeImage features
- compatible with Python 2.6 to 3.3.
smc.freeimage with libjpeg-turbo read JPEGs about three to six times faster than a standard build of PIL and writes JPEGs more than five times faster. By default PIL is compiled against the standard libjpeg library. Some Linux distributions have started to install libjpeg-turbo as libjpeg.so (libjpeg-turbo has a libjpeg v8 compatible ABI). On these platforms PIL is almost as fast as smc.freeimage.
JPEG's restart markers are not compatible with libjpeg-turbo's Huffman decoder optimization and reduce performance a lot. Please read the section "Restart Makers" on the page http://www.libjpeg-turbo.org/About/Performance for more information.:
Python:
2.7.3
read / write cycles::
300
test image:
1210x1778 24bpp JPEG (pon.jpg)
platform:
Linux 64bit
hardware:
Intel Xeon hexacore W3680@3.33GHz with 24 GB RAM- read JPEG 12.857 sec
- read JPEG 6.629 sec (resaved)
- write JPEG 21.817 sec
- read JPEG 9.297 sec
- read JPEG 3.909 sec (resaved)
- write JPEG 5.857 sec
- read LZW TIFF 17.947 sec
- read biton G4 TIFF 2.068 sec
- resize 3.850 sec (box)
- resize 5.022 sec (bilinear)
- resize 7.942 sec (bspline)
- resize 7.222 sec (bicubic)
- resize 7.941 sec (catmull rom spline)
- resize 10.232 sec (lanczos3)
- tiff numpy.asarray() with bytescale() 0.006 sec
- tiff load + numpy.asarray() with bytescale() 18.043 sec
- read JPEG 30.389 sec
- read JPEG 23.118 sec (resaved)
- write JPEG 34.405 sec
- read LZW TIFF 21.596 sec
- read biton G4 TIFF: decoder group4 not available
- resize 0.032 sec (nearest)
- resize 1.074 sec (bilinear)
- resize 2.924 sec (bicubic)
- resize 8.056 sec (antialias)
- tiff scipy fromimage() with bytescale() 1.165 sec
- tiff scipy imread() with bytescale() 22.939 sec
- read JPEG 9.403 sec
- read JPEG 4.696 sec (resaved)
- write JPEG 6.165 sec
- read JPEG 31.487 sec
- read JPEG 24.047 sec (resaved)
- write JPEG 38.643 sec
- read LZW TIFF 20.476 sec
- read biton G4 TIFF 15.224 sec
- resize 1.412 sec (BoxFilter)
- BUG: pgmagick ignores all filter settings for filterType()
- read JPEG 9.221 sec
- read JPEG 4.522 sec (resaved)
- write JPEG 8.595 sec
- Faster! JPEG performance is about 3 to 6 times faster than PIL, numpy buffer access is more than 100 times faster and consumes less memory due to zero copy design.
- Modern file formats! smc.freeimage supports JPEG 2000, HDR and EXR high dynamic range images and raw camera data (RAW).
- Full baseline TIFF support! Contrary to PIL smc.freeimage supports all flavors of baseline TIFF like G3 and G4 compression and multipage TIFFs.
- PEP 3118 buffer interface that exports images as 2d or 3d non-contiguous buffer.
- Correct and optimized integration of a color management system (LittleCMS2) instead of lcms1 integration including caching of optimized transformations, in-place transformation and introspection of profiles.
- Structured metadata access to EXIF, XMP and IPTC information, also supports fast loading of metadata without loading pixel data.
- Lot's of color types! Bitmap (8bit) with 1, 4, 8, 16, 24 and 32 bits per pixel, (unsigned) int 16 and 32, float, double gray scale, complex, RGBA 16bit and RGBA floats.
- Static build support, no need for "make install". You just need a C99 compatible C/C++ compiler, make and nasm (for FreeImage-Turob).
- Few image filters, no support for complex image filters in FreeImage
- Low quality resize filters are slower than PIL's filters
- No drawing API for primitives (lines, circles, boxes)
- No text drawing support and libfreetype integration.
- Still not feature complete and under development.
An experimental fork of FreeImage with libjpeg-turbo is available at https://bitbucket.org/tiran/freeimageturbo
Neither the Windows build files nor the test images are included in the source distribution. All files can be downloaded from https://bitbucket.org/tiran/smc.freeimage .
Christian Heimes
Dirk Rothe (testing and proposals)
Copyright (C) 2008-2012 semantics GmbH. All Rights Reserved.:
semantics
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