Provide a specialized TIFF reader for files using RAW compression

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 3.15
• Fix Version/s: 3.16
• Component/s: Coverage
• Labels:

  • Performance

The TIFF image reader provided in JAI Image I/O can read a reasonably wide range of TIFF encodings, but has the following inconvenient:

• It doesn't support BigTIFF format.
• It is not as fast as it could be when reading from files.
• It has bugs: when the image is written in an existing destination image, the destination is sometime surrounded by a black border. Note that a workaround exists in MosaicImageReader for this bug.

In the particular case where the data are read from a plain file and the compression is RAW, we can achieve better performance by writing our own RawTiffImageReader. Initial benchmark suggest that the specialized reader is 3 time faster than the JAI reader when the pixel values are already present in the OS disk cache. The gain is smaller when the OS needs to perform an actual disk read operation, but still exist.

As a bonus, we gain support for BigTIFF.

• Assignee:

  Martin Desruisseaux

  Reporter:

  Martin Desruisseaux

• Created:

  07/Sep/2010 15:04

  Updated:

  13/Apr/2011 15:43

  Resolved:

  13/Apr/2011 15:43