PIL image to array (numpy array to array) - Python

Question

I have a .jpg image that I would like to convert to Python array, because I implemented treatment routines handling plain Python arrays.

It seems that PIL images su

Answer 1

I highly recommend you use the tobytes function of the Image object. After some timing checks this is much more efficient.

def jpg_image_to_array(image_path):
  """
  Loads JPEG image into 3D Numpy array of shape 
  (width, height, channels)
  """
  with Image.open(image_path) as image:         
    im_arr = np.fromstring(image.tobytes(), dtype=np.uint8)
    im_arr = im_arr.reshape((image.size[1], image.size[0], 3))                                   
  return im_arr

The timings I ran on my laptop show

In [76]: %timeit np.fromstring(im.tobytes(), dtype=np.uint8)
1000 loops, best of 3: 230 µs per loop

In [77]: %timeit np.array(im.getdata(), dtype=np.uint8)
10 loops, best of 3: 114 ms per loop

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