Question

I try open a tif image with 16-bit per pixel and multi-band to convert it in a raw file. I’m using PIL with the next commands i = Image.open('image.tif') and after I use rawData = i.tostring(). It doesn’t work with multi-band tif image.

The error is:

File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\PIL\Image.py", line 1980, in open
    raise IOError("cannot identify image file")
IOError: cannot identify image file

The directory contains the file.

How I must do it ?

Answer 1

GDAL is pretty good at opening multiband rasters, and supports 11 different band types, including int16.

from osgeo import gdal
import numpy as np

ds = gdal.Open('image.tif')

# loop through each band
for bi in range(ds.RasterCount):
    band = ds.GetRasterBand(bi + 1)
    # Read this band into a 2D NumPy array
    ar = band.ReadAsArray()
    print('Band %d has type %s'%(bi + 1, ar.dtype))
    raw = ar.tostring()