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c#.netimagematlabsystem.drawing

extract pixels from System.Drawing.Bitmap

I am using some .NET assembly from MATLAB which produces a System.Drawing.Bitmap object. I would like to get a MATLAB matrix with the pixels out of it. How do you do that?

I don't want to save the image to disk and then use imread.

Solution

  • Based on Jeroen's answer, here is the MATLAB code to do the conversion:

    % make sure the .NET assembly is loaded
NET.addAssembly('System.Drawing');

% read image from file as Bitmap
bmp = System.Drawing.Bitmap(which('football.jpg'));
w = bmp.Width;
h = bmp.Height;

% lock bitmap into memory for reading
bmpData = bmp.LockBits(System.Drawing.Rectangle(0, 0, w, h), ...
    System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageLockMode.ReadOnly, bmp.PixelFormat);

% get pointer to pixels, and copy RGB values into an array of bytes
num = abs(bmpData.Stride) * h;
bytes = NET.createArray('System.Byte', num);
System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.Copy(bmpData.Scan0, bytes, 0, num);

% unlock bitmap
bmp.UnlockBits(bmpData);

% cleanup
clear bmp bmpData num

% convert to MATLAB image
bytes = uint8(bytes);
img = permute(flipdim(reshape(reshape(bytes,3,w*h)',[w,h,3]),3),[2 1 3]);

% show result
imshow(img)

    The last statement can be hard to understand. It is in fact equivalent to the following:

    % bitmap RGB values are interleaved: b1,g1,r1,b2,g2,r2,...
% and stored in a row-major order
b = reshape(bytes(1:3:end), [w,h])';
g = reshape(bytes(2:3:end), [w,h])';
r = reshape(bytes(3:3:end), [w,h])';
img = cat(3, r,g,b);

    The result:

    image