We Keep Coding

C# Read huge image into array

I have huge images (1.800MP # 8bit or 16bit), all grayscale, no alpha, transparency or other stuff.
They may come as png, tiff, bmp, or even jpeg, so I need an image library to handle the reading, decompression and stuff.
After this, I just want to get an array with the grayscale pixel values out - preferrably 2d, but 1d is also alright. It also may be ushort all the time, even for the 8bit images.
I tried using the buid-int BitmapImage of C# - no luck, just throws exceptions for images this large.
Any other libraries that can give me the grayscale values, without hassle?

It will be faster if you use simple FileReader to read the content and generate your own array rather then looking for a library.

Capture image from touch of PixelSense-compatible PC and save it as .bmp

I'm using Microsoft Surface 2.0 SDK with SUR40 PixelSense compatible computer. I need to capture image from it's touch and save it as .bmp. Since Surface SDK comes with RawImageVisualizer example, which displays picture from touch on the screen, I've tried to modify program for writing picture to HDD. The problem is, I get ArgumentException: Parameter is invalid during building Image from byte array captured from touch.
This is how I retrieve byte array with image data from FrameReceivedEventArgs on FrameReceived event:
event.UpdateRawImage(
ImageType.Normalized,
normalizedImage,
0, 0,
InteractiveSurface.PrimarySurfaceDevice.WorkingAreaWidth,
InteractiveSurface.PrimarySurfaceDevice.WorkingAreaHeight);
And that's how I try to write bytes as .bmp to disk:
System.Drawing.Image img;
using (System.Drawing.Image raw = System.Drawing.Image.FromStream(new MemoryStream(normalizedImage)))
{
img = raw.Clone() as System.Drawing.Bitmap;
}
img.Save("C:/img.bmp", System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Bmp);
So I get the exception trying to create Image from stream. Nevertheless this byte array works totally fine with Texture2D and SpriteBatch which displays it. How can I fix ArgumentException?

i've just realized, that UpdateRawImage does not return a byte representation of PNG file, but only an array of pixels. So, to build an image from it, one have to write all other parts of file structure to the array: header and color table (if needed). In many cases this can be simply done with one of System.Drawing.Bitmap constructors:
public Bitmap(
int width,
int height,
int stride,
PixelFormat format,
IntPtr scan0
)
But I was not so lucky, because UpdateRawImage returns 8bpp grayscale pixels, and PixelFormat enum doesn't support them (the most close is Format16bppGrayScale, but it uses 2 bytes for pixel, not one). So, in this particular situation, there are two obvious solutions. The first is making a new array of pixels, which meets one of PixelFormat standards (that was my choice, because I need 24-bit RGB image, despite it's actually black-white with only 256 shades). The second is writing BMP headers manually (and it's not very difficult due to open specs).

c# When does System.Drawing.Bitmap decompress the image stream?

Right now I am using System.Drawing.Bitmap to take an image and divide it into regions. I assume that Bitmap must decompress the image in order to perform operations on it.
However, the Bitmap class accepts these formats: BMP, GIF, EXIF, JPG, PNG and TIFF
Some of these formats are compressed, so if the data in the stream is compressed, doesn't it have to be decompressed to perform manipulations? If so, does that mean that the Bitmap class allocates more memory for the decompressed version of the stream?
i feel like if the bitmap class makes data modifications to the stream then it would have to decompress the stream which should make the bitmap class take the same amount of memory working with BMP streams as when it works with PNG streams, despite the fact that the PNG streams is smaller.

In fact it does, GDI needs raw pixel data to feed it to the graphic card and/or represent it, so yes, it's being decompressed, but may be you don't see the memory rising because it's done into the system/graphic card.
Some special cases are DXT textures and some other special types which are understood by the hardware and don't need to be decompressed to work.

YcbCr image representation

I m new in image processing field. I have worked with bmp images but currently i have a problem at hand which needs image to be converted into YCbCr color space before further processing. I have read about YCbCr and conversion process but the problem is i have no idea how i will store the YCbCr data in image format and which image format will support it.
i mean in bmp images rgb components are stored in bgr format, bytes should be multiples of 4 etc, but what about YCbCr? how they are represented?
i m sorry if this sounds very lame. I googled it a little but the thing is i don't think i m going in right direction. Actually this is for my final project and i m running out of time.
Update: actually there is no need to store it in some image container although tiff and jpeg can be used. i get around it by just converting rgb to YCbCr processing it and then converting it back to rgb pixel by pixel.

Both the formats only need three bytes for each pixel. So, as long as you store your pixels in some uncompressed format such as ppm, you do not need to bother about the conversion. When you are writing, put the Y into R, Cb int G and Cr into the blue bytes respectively. When you read in the values, it is up to to your program to interpret them - the default interpretation of most image processing programs is to treat them as RGB, but you can tell it to read them in as YCbCr
If you choose to store it in some compressed format such as jpeg, the values that you read back might not be the same as the ones that you store, but the decision depends on the accuracy that you need.

Image manipulation in C#

I am loading a JPG image from hard disk into a byte[]. Is there a way to resize the image (reduce resolution) without the need to put it in a Bitmap object?
thanks

There are always ways but whether they are better... a JPG is a compressed image format which means that to do any image manipulation on it you need something to interpret that data. The bimap object will do this for you but if you want to go another route you'll need to look into understanding the jpeg spec, creating some kind of parser, etc. It might be that there are shortcuts that can be used without needing to do full intepretation of the original jpg but I think it would be a bad idea.
Oh, and not to forget there are different file formats for JPG apparently (JFIF and EXIF) that you will ened to understand...
I'd think very hard before avoiding objects that are specifically designed for the sort of thing you are trying to do.

A .jpeg file is just a bag o' bytes without a JPEG decoder. There's one built into the Bitmap class, it does a fine job decoding .jpeg files. The result is a Bitmap object, you can't get around that.
And it supports resizing through the Graphics class as well as the Bitmap(Image, Size) constructor. But yes, making a .jpeg image smaller often produces a file that's larger. That's an unavoidable side-effect of Graphics.Interpolation mode. It tries to improve the appearance of the reduced image by running the pixels through a filter. The Bicubic filter does an excellent job of it.
Looks great to the human eye, doesn't look so great to the JPEG encoder. The filter produces interpolated pixel colors, designed to avoid making image details disappear completely when the size is reduced. These blended pixel values however make it harder on the encoder to compress the image, thus producing a larger file.
You can tinker with Graphics.InterpolationMode and select a lower quality filter. Produces a poorer image, but easier to compress. I doubt you'll appreciate the result though.

Here's what I'm doing.
And no, I don't think you can resize an image without first processing it in-memory (i.e. in a Bitmap of some kind).
Decent quality resizing involves using an interpolation/extrapolation algorithm; it can't just be "pick out every n pixels", unless you can settle with nearest neighbor.
Here's some explanation: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-interpolation.htm
protected virtual byte[] Resize(byte[] data, int width, int height) {
var inStream = new MemoryStream(data);
var outStream = new MemoryStream();
var bmp = System.Drawing.Bitmap.FromStream(inStream);
var th = bmp.GetThumbnailImage(width, height, null, IntPtr.Zero);
th.Save(outStream, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Jpeg);
return outStream.ToArray(); }