VIPS: Open Source Image Processing Library & Command Line Tools
Fast and powerful image processing library with a command line interface, ideal for handling large images, available as open source software.
What is VIPS?
VIPS (Virtual Image Processing System) is an open source image processing library and set of command line tools. It was originally developed in the early 1990s at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Some key features of VIPS include:
- It is very fast compared to other image processing libraries thanks to its streaming, tile-based memory model. This makes it suitable for working with extremely large images that can be hundreds of gigapixels in size.
- It supports a wide range of image processing operations including resize, crop, rotate, extract regions, color space conversion, join images, and more.
- VIPS makes use of multiple processor cores automatically to carry out operations in parallel.
- It can load and save to a variety of image formats including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, WebP, FITS, Matlab, OpenEXR, and more.
- VIPS has bindings for programming languages like C, C++, Python, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, Go, and others.
- There are command line tools for basic image processing operations. The tools can also be used for batch processing large volumes of images.
Some common uses of VIPS include building high performance and scalable image processing into applications, processing very large scientific images, high resolution image processing for digital mapping, and image processing pipelines for machine learning applications.