How can I read the headers in complicated tiff files?

Hello dear all.

I have some tiff files that contain the information that I'm looking for within their header lines.

I used imfinfo and a custom function (tiff_read_header) but still I can't get to import into matlab what I see when opening the tiff with notepad++ (please see the attached file).

I could rename the tiff files to dat and then by using importdata I can manipulate them, but still that's not a neat solution...

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance,

Melina.

Answer 1

[Kojiro Saito]

How about using LibTIFF library?

Ref: Reading Image Data and Metadata from TIFF Files

t = Tiff('FILENAME.tif','r');
tagValue = t.getTag('SOME_TAG_ID');

[Melina Zempila]

Hello Kojiro,

unfortunately none of the tags that I'm getting through "tiff.getTagNames()" corresponds to the fields I have in the headerlines of the tiff image [please see attached file].

For example, there is the field "Camera:IrradianceCalibrationMeasurementGold" in the header that is not a recognised tag and that make sense somehow since it's in the header of the tiff and not an attribute of the file - I believe.

Thank you though for your suggestion,

Melina.

[Kojiro Saito]

Did my answer solve your issue? Your tiff image seems to have XMP meta data, but I don't have those kinds of tiff sample now.

[Melina Zempila]

Hi Kojiro,

unfortunately, as I wrote above, the getTag doesn't do the work I need, simply because the information I'm looking for is not in the tags.

But your comment regarding XMP metadata led me to the following link that says how to convert tiff to json files that solves my problem!

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9375057/xmp-toolbox-for-matlab

Best regards, Melina

P.S. Here is the content that helped me

*

I have found the answer. The best way is to download ExifTool and any Matlab JSON parser. It is possible to extract it from any file format, including .DNG, .XMP, .JPEG, .TIFF.

Step 1: Extract the info into temporary JSON file by using

system(['exiftool -struct -j ' fileName '>' tempFile]);

Step 2: Call the JSON parser on the tempFile Step 3: You have the data in Matlab struct.

*

P.S.1 The parse_json function didn't work for me but it's easy to built one of my own.

: )

[Kojiro Saito]

Glad to hear that you have found the answer!