Question

I’m new to image processing with Python and met a strange problem.

For example I have a 2*2 black-white bitmap image which pixels are following:

black white

white black

Use PIL and convert it to numpy:

>>> import Image
>>> import numpy
>>> im = Image.open('test.bmp')
>>> im
<BmpImagePlugin.BmpImageFile image mode=1 size=2x2 at 0x95A54EC>
>>> numpy.asarray(im)
array([[ True,  True],
       [False, False]], dtype=bool)
>>>

What puzzles me is the order of pixel in the array. Why not [[True, False], [False, True]]? Thanks.

---

UPDATE: the bitmap is here:
http://njuer.us/clippit/test.bmp

Answer 1

It looks like there are some bugs with converting to/from numpy with the 1 mode.

If you convert it to L first, it works fine:

>>> im
<BmpImagePlugin.BmpImageFile image mode=1 size=2x2 at 0x17F17E8>
>>> im2 = im.convert('L')
>>> numpy.asarray(im2)
array([[  0, 255],
       [255,   0]], dtype=uint8)

Also, if you try and convert a bool numpy array to PIL, you get strange results:

>>> testarr = numpy.array([[True,False],[True,False]], dtype=numpy.bool)
>>> testpil = Image.fromarray(testarr, mode='1')
>>> numpy.asarray(testpil)
array([[False, False],
       [False, False]], dtype=bool)

However, the exact same thing with uint8 works fine:

>>> testarr = numpy.array([[255,0],[0,255]], dtype=numpy.uint8)
>>> Image.fromarray(testarr)
<Image.Image image mode=L size=2x2 at 0x1B51320>
>>> numpy.asarray(Image.fromarray(testarr))
array([[255,   0],
       [  0, 255]], dtype=uint8)

So I would suggest using L as an intermediate datatype and then converting to 1 before saving if you need to save it in that format. Something like this:

>>> im
<BmpImagePlugin.BmpImageFile image mode=1 size=2x2 at 0x17F17E8>
>>> im2 = im.convert('L')
>>> arr = numpy.asarray(im2)
>>> arr
array([[  0, 255],
       [255,   0]], dtype=uint8)
>>> arr = arr == 255
>>> arr
array([[False,  True],
       [ True, False]], dtype=bool)

Then to convert back:

>>> backarr = numpy.zeros(arr.shape, dtype=numpy.uint8)
>>> backarr[arr] = 255
>>> backarr
array([[  0, 255],
       [255,   0]], dtype=uint8)
>>> Image.fromarray(backarr).convert('1')
<Image.Image image mode=1 size=2x2 at 0x1B41CB0>