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Am I creating lossless PNG images?

I am doing image processing in a scientific context. Whenever I need to save an image to the hard drive, I want to be able to reopen it at a later time and get exactly the data that I had before saving it. I exclusively use the PNG format, having always been under the impression that it is a lossless format. Is this always correct, provided I am not using the wrong bit-depth? Should encoder and decoder play no role at all? Specifically, the images I save

  • are present as 2D numpy arrays
  • have integer values from 0 to 255
  • are encoded with the OpenCV imwrite() function, e.g. cv2.imwrite("image.png", array)
like image 855
smcs Avatar asked Dec 19 '17 10:12

smcs


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1 Answers

PNG is a lossless format by design:

Since PNG's compression is fully lossless--and since it supports up to 48-bit truecolor or 16-bit grayscale--saving, restoring and re-saving an image will not degrade its quality, unlike standard JPEG (even at its highest quality settings).

The encoder and decoder should not matter, in regards of reading the images correctly. (Assuming, of course, they're not buggy).

And unlike TIFF, the PNG specification leaves no room for implementors to pick and choose what features they'll support; the result is that a PNG image saved in one app is readable in any other PNG-supporting application.

like image 143
Dan Mašek Avatar answered Sep 26 '22 02:09

Dan Mašek