[Numpy-discussion] PEP 368: Standard image protocol and class

[Lino Mastrodomenico]

[Sorry for the cross-posting, but I think this may be relevant for
both NumPy and ndimage.]

Hello everyone,

I have submitted to the Python core developers a new PEP (Python
Enhancement Proposal):

   http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0368/

It proposes two things:

 * the creation of a standard image protocol/interface that can be
hopefully implemented interoperably by most Python libraries that
manipulate images;

 * the addition to the Python standard library of a basic
implementation of the new protocol.

The new image protocol is heavily inspired by a subset of the NumPy
array interface, with a few image-specific additions and changes (e.g.
the "size" attribute of an image is a tuple (width, height)).

Of course it would be wonderful if these new image objects could
interoperate out-of-the-box with numpy arrays and ndimage functions.
There is another proposal that would be very useful for that, PEP 3118
by Travis Oliphant and Carl Banks:

    http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3118/

The image PEP (368) currently lists only modes based on uint8/16/32
numbers, but the final version will probably also include modes based
on float32 and float16 (converted in software to/from float32/64 when
necessary).

A discussion about it is currently going on in the python-3000 mailing list:

<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-July/thread.html#8648>

Any suggestion, comment or criticism from the NumPy/SciPy people would
be very useful, but IMHO keeping the discussion only on the
python-3000 ML may be a good idea, to avoid duplicating answers on
different mailing lists.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Lino Mastrodomenico
E-mail: l.mastrodomenico@gmail.com