TiffCraft

TiffCraft is a header-only C++ library for working with TIFF images. At the moment, it requires C++20 or newer and contains functionality for reading TIFF images in various uncompressed formats.

Objectives

TiffCraft is designed based on the following principles:

• Permissive license: to be used in open source and proprietary software.
• C++ header-only: to easy integration onto existing projects.
• Flexible but simple API: for ease of use.
• Feature complete: to cover a wide variety of use cases.
  • TiffCraft is NOT feature complete at this time! The objective is for guiding on-going development.

Usage

For quick access to TIFF image pixel data with individual pixels aligned to word boundaries (i.e. 8 bits, 16 bits, or 32 bits), you could use code like the following:

#include <tiffcraft/TiffExporter.hpp>
#include <functional>

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
  if (argc < 2) { return 1; }
  TiffCraft::TiffExporterAny tiffExporter;
  TiffCraft::load(argv[1], std::ref(tiffExporter), loadParams);
  auto image = iffExporter.takeImage();

  // your own image processing code

  return 0;
}

TiffExporterAny will decode and convert pixels to a flat-buffer (i.e. std::vector<std::byte>) with 1, 2, or 4 bytes per sample the source pixel format. For example, an image with 2-bits per sample is exported as an 8-bit image.

Advanced usage

Users that prefer to decode and handle the image pixel data themselves, or need to handle multiple frames per image, could write their own handler:

#include <tiffcraft/TiffImage.hpp>
#include <iostream>

int main() {
  TiffCraft::load("image.tiff",
    [](const TiffCraft::TiffImage::Header& header,
        const TiffCraft::TiffImage::IFD& ifd,
        TiffCraft::TiffImage::ImageData imageData) {
      std::cout << "Loaded IFD with " << ifd.entries().size()
                << " entries." << std::endl;
      std::cout << "Image data size: " << imageData.size() << std::endl;

      // Add your own image processing code here

    });

  return 0;
}

Features

TiffCraft supports the following features:

• Reading TIFF images
  • Read and display image metadata
  • Bilevel, grayscale, palette-color, and RGB images
    • Varying number of bits per sample
    • RGB images are supported only for 3-channel images (no extra samples)
• Compression is NOT supported yet.
• Writing TIFF images is NOT supported yet.

Advanced users could use TiffCraft for other configurations than those enumerated above by writing their customizing any of the existing exporter classes, or writing their own from scratch.

Feedback

Feedback is welcomed! Please don't hesitate to reach out by opening a GitHub issue if you have suggestions, feature requests, or bug reports.

Please let me know if you find this project useful!