scipy.misc module has no attribute imread?

Question

I am trying to read an image with scipy. However it does not accept the scipy.misc.imread part. What could be the cause of this?

>>> import scipy
>>> scipy.misc
<module 'scipy.misc' from 'C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\scipy\misc\__init__.pyc'>
>>> scipy.misc.imread('test.tif')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#11>", line 1, in <module>
    scipy.misc.imread('test.tif')
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'imread'

Answer 1

You need to install Pillow (formerly PIL). From the docs on scipy.misc:

Note that Pillow is not a dependency of SciPy but the image manipulation functions indicated in the list below are not available without it:

...

imread

...

After installing Pillow, I was able to access imread as follows:

In [1]: import scipy.misc

In [2]: scipy.misc.imread
Out[2]: <function scipy.misc.pilutil.imread>