AlgART-TIFF

AlgART library for TIFF support

About

AlgART-TIFF is a Java library providing complete read/write support for TIFF files.

Main AlgART-TIFF functions are available in SciChains visual constructor via scichains-map library.

See also AlgART-TIFF page on AlgART site.

Key features

• You have full control over TIFF-file structure: ability to analyze, read or write separate IFDs with help of TiffReader and TiffWriter classes.
• You can correctly read/write most variants of TIFF formats, including BigTIFF
• You can read images with unusual bit depths like 1 bit/pixel (binary) or "strange" precision 24-bit/samples
• You can read or write any rectangular area of image, either as byte[] arrays or as suitable primitive-type array (short[] for 16 bits/sample, float[] for floating-point etc.)
• You also can read or write separate TIFF tiles (or strips) with/without decoding/encoding data
• Concept of TiffMap, describing the grid of rectangular tiles, simplifies work with large images
• You can create large TIFF step-by-step: you start writing new image, then add data tile-per-tile or by a sequence of rectangular fragments, then complete writing this image
• If you add data by rectangular areas, you may control which tiles are already ready (filled with data), and flush them to file; so you can create a huge TIFF file without using a large amount of RAM

This library is designed as a powerful alternative to the TIFF support included in the popular SCIFIO library. This library is independent on SCIFIO, but recognizes the situation when SCIFIO (io.scif package) is available in the classpath. In this case, the TiffReader and TiffWriter classes also "understand" all TIFF compressions supported by io.scif.formats.tiff.TiffCompression class, in addition to the built-in compression formats. This is usually not important because this library supports almost all formats, but it may help to ensure compatibility when migrating from SCIFIO to AlgART-TIFF.

Usage

This library is a Maven project that can be installed by standard Maven tools or edited in IntelliJ IDEA.

You can use this library with the following Maven dependency in your POM:

 <dependencies>
    ...
    <dependency>
        <groupId>net.algart</groupId>
        <artifactId>algart-tiff</artifactId>
        <version>1.3.7</version>
    </dependency>
    ...
</dependencies>

Note that this library depends on the maven modules org.scijava:scijava-common and io.scif:scifio-jai-imageio, included in the SCIFIO framework. These modules are not currently deployed in Maven Central. Instead, SCIFIO stores them in its own repository maven.scijava.org. However, this should not make any difference when using AlgART-TIFF: in any case, all the necessary JARs are downloaded automatically.

This library does not depend on SCIFIO itself (io.scif:scifio), but can be used together with it.