[Insight-developers] Adding PPM (and PBM/PGM)

[kent williams]

We are in the process of converting an existing application suite to use ITK
instead of the library of home-made functions it currently uses.  One of the
tasks Hans has asked me to work on is to create an itk::ImageIO class that
reads and writes PPM files to contribute to ITK.

I have a couple of questions.

1. There is an existing library for reading/writing PPM files -- netpbm.
This is one of those old-school, sprawling packages with dozens of programs,
covered by a confusing variety of licenses.  Luckily it appears that the
library code needed to read and write PPM files is fairly compact and in the
public domain.

Would it be OK to include this library source in order to support the
PPMImageIO class?  I would of course first submit this as an Insight Journal
article.  The library itself is public domain, compact, portable, and
stable.

2. PPM is 2D only, and RGB only. I know there is pixel conversion code in
ITK, but how should an ImageIO class behave if it is asked to write a 3D
image when the image format only supports 2D?

The one example of a similar reader is itk::JPEGImageIO.h but it seems to be
pretty incomplete -- it looks like it doesn't pay any attention to the
requested pixel type in the Read method, and just assumes it will be 8 bit
pixels.




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