Various types of images in Java - java

When attemting to make a simple application which uses an image I was amazed at the large number of image types available to me. I did a search on them and whilst finding a little about them cannot work out what image is ment to be used in what circumstances.
The types of image I am confused about are Image, ImageIcon, and ImageIO.

The only one of those that is an image is Image. A more powerful sub-class of Image is BufferedImage.
An ImageIcon is an image based Icon.
ImageIO simply helps us to read and write images, and do other things with images.
Be sure to check the JavaDocs for each. It adds more details.
Image | BufferedImage | ImageIcon | ImageIO

Related

Jpeg to Svg and Image Tracing

Currently we have a requirement where we have an image depicting the blueprint of the mall (red specifies the booked up areas and white specifies the available areas) and the image is available in a raster (JPEG) format.
We would like to drag and drop some icons onto the available areas of the image (in white). There should also be zoom in and zoom out functionality to be given for the above image as well
Since the JPEG has a lossy scaling, zooming after a certain limit can result in a jagged image. One proposed solution is to convert the image to SVG (Scalable Vector graphics).
Going with the expanded form of SVG, it simply tells us that image is:
s=>scalable (i.e. you can zoom to any level without compromising the quality)
v=>vectorized (i.e co-ordinates are available)
So by simply looking at the XML format of the image, we can predict whether to allow dropping an object at fill=red or fill=white where red and white are the two colors in the image. This might not be appropriate solution, but I'm just guessing it this way
Now the problems I see with this approach is:
Converting an image with some open source tool (InkSpace) - if we trace it with ink-space, which uses portace inside it to trace the image, it can handle only black and white colors.
Note-: Most of the tools comes with some license.
Problem with inkspace is that it embeds the image into the SVG map and does not create the co-ordinates. If you trace it with inkspace, it only creates the outline of the image.
Converting it with some online utility - Not recommended in our case, but doing so results in a large size of the SVG image. For a 700 KB file, the SVG generated is about 39 MB, which when opened up on a browser crashes the browser.
Most of the time when the image is converted to an SVG, it becomes way too large a big factor to worry about. There are utilities available like Gzip to compress files, but this is a two way route - first you convert, then you compress.
Using delinate (which employs a portace and autotrace engines in it) - the quality of the image produced is not good.
Using Java code - Again the quality suffers. Java graphics are not fully developed to handle the conversion (size is again way too large)
Converting the image to PDF, then to SVG - this also embeds the image into the SVG file, which is useless as no co-ordinates are available
Does anybody got any idea on this ,how to deal with this situation?,Can we handle the drag and drop on raster(jpeg,png...etc) images itself?
Thanks
Dishant Anand

JavaFX: get BufferedImage from path

Coming from AWT/Swing, I've started experimenting a bit with JavaFX the last few days. I realized that what I used to do in thousands lines of codes can now be done in a few hundred.
One problem I came across is, however, the following: I'm trying to develop a small painting app where the user can choose brush size and color for its strokes. For all the strokes the user makes, I use the JavaFX class Path and add these paths to a Group (which is added to a Pane) where they are - automagically - painted. Now I want to store the resulting image as a jpg and try to raster all the paths in a BufferedImage. However, I found no functions in the API that help me do that.
I tried to use Canvas and its GraphicsContext, but that did not help. How could I raster all the JavaFX Paths from a list on an image?
Take a snapshot of your Group to get a JavaFX Image.
Use SwingFXUtils to convert your JavaFX image snapshot to a buffered image.
Use ImageIO to convert your buffered image to a jpeg, png, etc

What is the difference between the ways to read an Image file in Java?

There are various ways of reading an image file in java such as BufferedImage and ImageIcon to name a few. I want to know what is the difference between these cases? Are they context dependent that in a particular case only one of them can be used?
What would be the best way of reading a image selected by JFileChooser by the user and separating the color channels of an image?
A good way is to use the different ImageIO.read methods, which return BufferedImage objects.
Image is an abstract class, so I think the real question is which subclass is more efficient for your program. Use VolatileImage if you need hardware acceleration. More on that here.
ImageIcon (and Toolkit#createImage/Toolkit#getImage) use a background loading process. That is, after you call these methods, they will return immediately, having created a background thread to actually load the image data.
These were/are used when loading large images across slow connections, like ye old 28k modems (ah, how I remember the days). This means that your application can continue running while the images are been downloaded.
You'll find in the Graphics class the drawImage methods accept an ImageObserver interface and that java.awt.Component implements this interface, this allows components the ability to automatically update themselves once the image has actually finished loading.
ImageIO on the other hand will not return until the image is fully loaded. It also makes it easier to introduce new readers/writers, making the API far more flexible then the original API. ImageIO also supports a wider range of images out of the box.
BufferedImage is also a far more flexible image class, especially when it comes to apply effects to the image.
Now, I, personally, prefer ImageIO. If I know I'm loading large images or images over a potentially slow connection, I will create my own background thread to load them. While a little more complicated, the trade offs greatly out weight the small amount of extra work -IMHO
What would be the best way of reading a image selected by JFileChooser by the user and separating the color channels of an image?
ImageIO without a doubt. In order to do any serious manipulation of an image loaded using something ImageIcon, you'd have to convert that image to a BufferedImage anyway

Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage() vs ImageIO.read()

I'm creating a UI using Swing and I want to display an image in a JLabel. The code I use is the following:
JLabel label = new JLabel(new ImageIcon(ImageIO.read(new File("img.jpg"))));
This works fine if I use png images but when it comes to jpg (only some of them), I get a redish image (a different one than the one I see in Paint.NET).
The image I used is this one: img.jpg
So I tried (as an alternative):
Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage(new File("img.jpg").getAbsolutePath());
Does anyone have an idea of why this happening? Is it a special JPEG format which is not supported?
I've read on this forum that most people recommend to use ImageIO (here for example). Why?
Thanks a lot
As discussed here, your JPEG image may contain spurious transparency information. One simple expedient is to render the image in a buffer having a compatible color model, as shown here.
It looks like you have found a bug in ImageIO.read... (I can reproduce the red tint, and it is definitely not how it should look like).
You can try to
save the JPEG files with other settings
open/re-save the file with other programs (hoping to get a more common JPEG-encoding)
or use the Toolkit method (if you don't control the images).
The only problem with the Toolkit method is that the getImage() method returns immediately after it is invoked and the loading is happening on a background thread, so you cannot start working with the Image object immediately.

Resize Image files

I have a lot of images that taken by my Digital camera with very high resolution 3000 * 4000 and it takes a lot of Hard disk space, I used Photoshop to open each Image and re-size it o be with small resolution, but it needs a lot of time and effort
I think that I can write simple program that open the folder of images and read each file and get it's width and height and if it's very high change it and overwrite the image with the small one.
Here some code I use in a Java-EE project (should work in normal application to:
int rw = the width I needed;
BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(new File(filename));
ResampleOp resampleOp = new ResampleOp(rw,(rw * image.getHeight()) / image.getWidth() );
resampleOp.setFilter(ResampleFilters.getLanczos3Filter());
image = resampleOp.filter(image, null);
File tmpFile = new File(tmpName);
ImageIO.write(image, "jpg", tmpFile);
The resample filter comes from java-image-scaling library. It also contains BSpline and Bicubic filters among others if you don't like the Lanczos3. If the images are not in sRGB color space Java silently converts the color space to sRGB (which accidentally was what I needed).
Also Java loses all EXIF data, thought it does provide some (very hard to use) methods to retrieve it. For color correct rendering you may wish to at least add a sRGB flag to the file. For that see here.
+1 to what some of the other folks said about not specifically needing Java for this, but I imagine you must have known this and were maybe asking because you either wanted to write such a utility or thought it would be fun?
Either way, getting the image file listing from a dir is straight forward, resizing them correctly can take a bit more leg work as you'll notice from Googling for best-practices and seeing about 9 different ways to actually resize the files.
I wrote imgscalr to address this exact issue; it's a dead-simple API (single class, bunch of static methods) and has some good adoption in webapps and other tools utilizing it.
Steps to resize would look like this (roughly):
Get file list
BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(files[i]);
image = Scalr.resize(image, width);
ImageIO.write(image);
There are a multitude of "resize" methods to call on the Scalr class, and all of them honor the image's original proportions. So if you scale only using a targetWidth (say 1024 pixels) the height will be calculated for you to make sure the image still looks exactly right.
If you scale with width and height, but they would violate the proportions of the image and make it look "Stretched", then based on the orientation of the image (portrait or landscape) one dimension will be used as the anchor and the other incorrect dimension will be recalculated for you transparently.
There are also a multitude of different Quality settings and FIT-TO scaling modes you can use, but the library was designed to "do the right thing" always, so using it is very easy.
You can dig through the source, it is all Apache 2 licensed. You can see that it implements the Java2D team's best-practices for scaling images in Java and pedantically cleans up after itself so no memory gets leaked.
Hope that helps.
You do not need Java to do this. It's a waste of time and resources. If you have photoshop you can do it with recording actions: batch resize using actions
AffineTransformOp offers the additional flexibility of choosing the interpolation type, as shown here.
You can individually or batch resize with our desktop image resizing application called Sizester. There's a full functioning 15-day free trial on our site (www.sizester.com).

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