Importing and Exporting Images

Image Processing Toolbox supports images generated by a wide range of devices, including digital cameras, satellite and airborne sensors, medical imaging devices, microscopes, telescopes, and other scientific instruments. You can visualize, analyze, and process these images in many data types, including single- and double-precision floating-point and signed and unsigned 8-, 16-, and 32-bit integers.

There are several ways to import and export images into and out of the MATLAB^® environment for processing. You can use Image Acquisition Toolbox™ to acquire live images from Web cameras, frame grabbers, DCAM-compatible cameras, and other devices. Using Database Toolbox™, you can access images stored in ODBC/JDBC-compliant databases.

Standard and Specialized Formats Supported

MATLAB supports standard data and image formats, including JPEG, JPEG-2000, TIFF, PNG, HDF, HDF-EOS, FITS, Microsoft^® Excel^®, ASCII, and binary files. It also supports the multiband image formats BIP and BIL, as used by LANDSAT for example. Low-level I/O and memory mapping functions enable you to develop custom routines for working with any data format.

Image Processing Toolbox supports a number of specialized image file formats. For medical images, it supports the DICOM file format, including associated metadata, as well as the Analyze 7.5 and Interfile formats. The toolbox can also read geospatial images in the NITF format and high dynamic range images in the HDR format.