Mahotas-imread is a simple module with a small number of functions:

imread

Reads an image file

imread_multi

Reads an image file with multiple images. Currently, TIFF and STK (a TIFF sub-based format) support this function.

imsave

Writes an image file

Example (which uses mahotas for Gaussian filtering):

from imread import imread, imsave
from mahotas import gaussian_filter
lena = imread('lena.jpeg')

lena = gaussian_filter(lena.astype(float), 4.)
imsave('lena-filtered.jpeg', lena)

This grew out of frustration at current image loading solutions in Python, in either my packages [mahotas] or packages from others [scikit-image, for example].

The relationship with numpy is very contained and this could be easily repurposed to load images in other frameworks, even other programming languages.

Online documentation

Luis Pedro Coelho Mahotas: Open source software for scriptable computer vision in Journal of Open Research Software, vol 1, 2013. [DOI]

In Bibtex format:

@article{mahotas,
    author = {Luis Pedro Coelho},
    title = {Mahotas: Open source software for scriptable computer vision},
    journal = {Journal of Open Research Software},
    year = {2013},
    doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/jors.ac},
    month = {July},
    volume = {1}
}

To compile on debian/ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libpng12-dev libtiff4-dev libwebp-dev
sudo apt-get install xcftools

To compile on Mac:

sudo port install libpng tiff webp

Either way, you can then compile with:

python setup.py build

and install with:

python setup.py install

On Windows, you can also just download a pre-built package from C. Gohlke's repository

Documentation: http://imread.readthedocs.org/

Issue Tracker: github imread issues <https://github.com/luispedro/imread__

Mailing List: Use the pythonvision mailing list for questions, bug submissions, etc.

Main Author & Maintainer: Luis Pedro Coelho (follow on twitter or github).

Python versions 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, and 3.4 are officially supported.

Python 3.2 (and earlier versions in the Python 3 series) are officially not supported. Patches will be accepted if they do not mess up anything else, but bug reports will not be considered.

• Improve tests to work after installation
• Fix compilation in MSVC (patch by Christoph Gohlke)

• Add magic-number based format auto-detection
• Auto detect whether webp is installed
• Fix WebP reading (update to newer API)

• Add configuration for TIFF saving
• Correctly save 16 bit PNG images
• Better error messages for JPEG

• Added imload*/imwrite synonyms as suggested by Thouis (Ray) Jones
• Options framework
• Allow user to specify JPEG quality when saving
• Fix loading of 16 bit PNG images

• Fix possible crash on error with TIFF
• Fix compilation on Windows (reported by Volker Hilsenstein)
• Make it easy to compile without WebP

• Support for reading from in-memory blobs
• Support for reading & writing TIFF metadata
• Add PHOTOMETRIC tag to TIFF (reported by Volker Hilsenstein)
• Support writing RGB TIFFs

• Fix hard crash when saving with non-existing file type
• Fix compilation on MacOS (patch by Alexander Bohn)
• Add verbose argument to tests.run()
• Better error when attempting to save floating point images

• Correctly accept uppercase extensions
• Python 3 support (patch by Christoph Gohlke [pull request 8 on github])
• Read 1-Bit PNGs
• Read simple BMPs (compression and many bit types not supported)
• More complete debug mode (export DEBUG=2 when building), more checks

• Add lzw.cpp to source distribution
• Support saving 16-bit TIFF
• Better Mac OS support (patch from Alexander Bohn)

• Fix imread_multi

• Add formatstr argument to imread
• Open files in binary mode on Windows (patch by Christoph Gohlke)
• Read-only support for LSM files
• Read-only support for XCF files (through xcf2png)
• Fix writing of non-contiguous images (at least PNG was affected)

• Add missing files to distribution

• Compile on MSVC++ (Patches by Christoph Gohlke)
• Support for WebP
• Support for 1-bit TIFFs
• Better error message
• Support for multi-page TIFF reading
• Experimental read-only support for STK files

• Support for PNG
• Support for TIFF
• Support for JPEG