what is the format of a binary image & how is it different from jpg, png images? - image

I searched the internet for the basic formats of image files (e.g. .jpg, .png, .gif) as there is a specific format for .doc, .pdf etc. But didn't got anything relevant. And today I also came with an .bin image format. BIN signifies that the image is in the Binary format. So, what is the Internal format of .jpg image file. And How is it different from .bin (Binary) format. Because everything is Basically saved in Binary Form. And How is BITMAP Image different from .jpg format.

if you open the files in notepad or change the jpg to .txt and a exe to .txt you will see the first X amount of bytes defines what type of file it is etc. I have never looked into where the "standard" is but as you will see all JPEGS start with a specific byte and EXE start with a specific byte no matter what the content
Also JPEG is a licensed compressed form of an image and BMP is Microsoft Windows version of an image(with little or no compression I believe. png is open source or GPL licensed and technically your files do not need to be "licensed" to convert to JPEG. This is the same as a .MP3 vs a.OGG in terms of music

Related

Difference between TIFF image vs TIFF file

These 2 files are TIFF files but the file type is different, one is TIFF IMAGE and TIFF File. Can someone tell me the difference between them? I can't find the exact reason.
EDIT:
After enabling file extension

How to recognize an image file format using its contents?

If a Image file is of format .png then it will contain ‰PNG, at the beginning of the file. (when read in Text mode)
If a Image file is of format .bmp then it will contain BM, at the beginning of the file. (when read in Text mode)
I know that Image formats contain text (data) of certain size (bytes) in the beginning of the file, which is used as metadata of the Image file?
My Questions are:-
Is this behavior same in all image file formats (or formats in general)?
Could a image file (of no extension) be recognized just using this data?
Is there information available on how this metadata is broken down? By that I mean, data at which position in the metadata has what meaning?
Is this behavior same in all image file formats (or formats in
general)?
For most of them, yes. There are some proprietary formats (e.g. for games) that might have very short or no metadata. Also, metadata might be in another file (e.g. animations together with XML metadata).
Could a image file (of no extension) be recognized just using this
data?
Yes. In fact, most image viewers will warn you if an image file has an incorrect extension and ask you if they should fix it.
On Unix systems, there's a file command that identifies files based on their metadata. There is a better tool specific for images called identify (part of ImageMagick) that returns more detailed information on resolution, bitdepth, etc.
Is there information available on how this metadata is broken down? By
that I mean, data at which position in the metadata has what meaning?
There are books about (image) file formats and for most formats, this information is available in official specifications (e.g. RFC 2083 for PNG). They list all of the (optional) file contents, describe the compressions and what a viewer/decoder/encoder can/must/should do with the data. A good starting point might be the Wikipedia list of image file formats.
Note that based on the examples you gave I suppose you opened files with a text editor which is not the ideal tool for that task. It's better to use a hex-editor for this. Text editors won't show most bytes (e.g. 255) by default and interprete others (e.g. tab or line feed). They might be good enough to see magic text strings like "BM" and "PNG", but with a hex editor, you can see both these text parts and their numerical representation - e.g. allowing you to extract image width and height. For this, some tool to convert hexademical values to decimal is useful, most calculators can do this.
As an example, let's look at the beginning of a PNG file with a resolution of 6146 x 14293 in both a text editor and a hex editor:
You can see that the file is a PNG image in both of them, that's correct. But the marked part in the hex editor view will show the width and height of the image (matching the PNG chunk specification of the "IHDR" part) - 0x00001802 is 6146 in decimal, 0x000037D5 is 14293. There's no way to do this in the text editor.
Also note that even if you don't know an image format, you might be lucky with just guessing it's uncompressed data (this often works for some game image file formats, most notable Unity's "assets"). E.g. if you rename files to ".raw", the image viewer IrfanView will give you a dialog (see the screenshot below) where you can guess width, height and bit depth of the image and see if the result looks good. This requires some experience in interpreting the outcome though, if width and bitdepth don't match, images will look like noise, warped, or have wrong colors.
This "image geometry guessing" can be improved/automated by trying different widths and computing the correlation coefficent between two lines. The tool raw2tiff can do this. Quote from the site:
There is no magic, it is just a mathematical statistics, so it can be
wrong in some cases. But for most ordinary images guessing method will
work fine.
Using Imagemagick, you can get that information (if available) for formats that Imagemagick can read from its "magick" data in the header file as follows:
convert image -format "%m\n" info:
For example:
convert lena.png -format "%m\n" info:
PNG
convert lena.jpg -format "%m\n" info:
JPEG
convert lena.pnm -format "%m\n" info:
PPM
Even if the suffix is removed, this still works:
convert lena_copy -format "%m\n" info:
PNG

GIF format as png?

I'm seeing some images online that end in .png but appear as GIF. How is this possible?
Example:
https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/loading/6267221601681408/5689792285114368.png
This is a GIF file, with an .png extension. Though the extension is "wrong", many image viewers (including browsers) can still it interpret them correctly because they don't believe blindly what the extension says (remember that the "extension" is just a hint), but they look into the image content. The first bytes of most common image formats allow to easily identify the image type. In this case, you can check (looking at the image content, say, in some hexadecimal editor/viewer) that the file content starts with the ASCII characters "GIF89a".

Matlab image conversion jp2 to jpg

I have a weird problem in matlab. I have code that takes in a directory of jp2 files and converts all of them to either tiff, png, or a jpg file. Then it puts these files in a new directory. The user can specify how big they want the file to be in terms of how many pixels are used (EX: 1:3:end is every three pixels). This code works perfectly for the png and tiff conversions.
With the jpg conversion there is no error whatsoever but when I go to click on the jpeg file in the new folder (which it does go to at least) It says "Windows Photo Viewer can't open this picture because the file appears to be damaged, corrupted, or is too large" I tried opening the pictures in other viewers but it said the same thing. All of the png and tiff pictures opened fine.
Some help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Edit: I noticed when I call imshow on the location of the jpeg file it actually does show up in matlab. It still does not show up in any image viewers though

JPG vs. JPEG image formats

I often use JPEG images, and I have noticed that there are two very similar file extensions: .jpg, which my mobile's camera and the Preview application use, and .jpeg, with which Image Capture saves the images from scanning with my Canon MX455 printer. LaTeX doesn't seem to distinguish, as I gave it a .jpeg with the extension changed to .jpg and the result seems to be the same as if it had been a .jpg right from the start. I have wondered what the difference between the two is. I have come across this question, and will certainly read through it, though at the moment I'm slightly out of time. However, from what I saw giving it a quick look, it seems not to distinguish the two extensions. In fact, it seems the file type's name is JPEG and the file extension is .jpg:
JPEG (or JPG, for the file extension; Joint Photographic Experts Group)
(excerpted from the first answer there). So is there any big difference between the two extensions? And if so, what is it?
JPG and JPEG stand both for an image format proposed and supported by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. The two terms have the same meaning and are interchangeable.
To read on, check out Difference between JPG and JPEG.
The reason for the different file extensions dates back to the early versions of Windows. The original file extension for the Joint Photographic Expert Group File Format was ‘.jpeg’; however in Windows all files required a three letter file extension. So, the file extension was shortened to ‘.jpg’. However, Macintosh was not limited to three letter file extensions, so Mac users used ‘.jpeg’. Eventually, with upgrades Windows also began to accept ‘.jpeg’. However, many users were already used to ‘.jpg’, so both the three letter file extension and the four letter extension began to be commonly used, and still is.
Today, the most commonly accepted and used form is the ‘.jpg’, as many users were Windows users. Imaging applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, save all JPEG files with a ".jpg" extension on both Mac and Windows, in an attempt to avoid confusion. The Joint Photographic Expert Group File Format can also be saved with the upper-case ‘.JPEG’ and ‘.JPG’ file extensions, which are less common, but also accepted.
The term "JPEG" is an acronym for the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which created the standard.
.jpeg and .jpg files are identical.
JPEG images are identified with 6 different standard file name extensions:
.jpg
.jpeg
.jpe
.jif
.jfif
.jfi
The jpg was used in Microsoft Operating Systems when they only supported 3 chars-extensions.
The JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF - last three extensions in my list) is an image file format standard for exchanging JPEG encoded files compliant with the JPEG Interchange Format (JIF) standard, solving some of JIF's limitations in regard. Image data in JFIF files is compressed using the techniques in the JPEG standard, hence JFIF is sometimes referred to as "JPEG/JFIF".
No difference at all.
I personally prefer having 3 letters extensions, but you might prefer having the full name.
It's pure aestetics (personal taste), nothing else.
The format doesn't change.
You can rename the jpeg files into jpg (or vice versa) an nothing changes: they will open in your picture viewer.
By opening both a JPG and a JPEG file with an hex editor, you will notice that they share the very same heading information.
They are identical. JPG is simply a holdover from the days of DOS when file extensions were required to be 3 characters long. You can find out more information about the JPEG standard here. A question very similar to this one was asked over at SuperUser, where the accepted answer should give you some more detailed information.
There is no difference between them, it just a file extension for image/jpeg mime type. In fact file extension for image/jpeg is .jpg, .jpeg, .jpe
.jif, .jfif, .jfi
There's no difference between the file extensions, and they are used interchangeably. I guess the 3-letter version stems from the DOS era...
However, there are different "flavors" of JPEG files. Most notably the JFIF standard and the EXIF standard. Most often these just use .jpg or .jpeg as file extensions, JFIF sometimes uses .jif or .jfif.

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