Matlab cannot read the tiff image

Matlab sometimes gives a warning when running the imread function to read a TIFF image.

My computer system is win8.1, and the Matlab is 2013b. What's wrong with this problem? How to fix it?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

It took me a bit of chasing to track this

34022 Color table. TIFF/IT TIFF/IT spec, 7.2.8.4 Note this 7.2.8.4

TIFF/IT is a standard for the exchange of digital adverts and complete pages

34022 IT8COLORTABLE

So what you have is a TIFF/IT tag IT8COLORTABLE . Now to research about TIFF/IT

http://preformatiff.github.io/TiffGuide/images/specificationTIFF.odt

<<TIFF/IT breaks TIFF 6.0 in many ways. TIFF/IT is certainly inspired by TIFF, but it is not a valid subset of TIFF 6.0 by far. It's best regarded a different file format altogether. [...]

TIFF/IT does not include the tag datatype 13 (IFD), nor, of course, its BigTIFF equivalent 18 (IFD8). It therefore enforces the problematically ambiguous use of the datatype 4 (Long, unsigned 32bit integer). [...] It therefore makes sense for TIFF/A to distinguish between unsigned 32bit integer data that is meant to communicate an actual integer value on the one hand, and a pointer to an auxiliary IFD on the other hand. [...]

TIFF/IT supports ICC color profiles. TIFF/A does not. (See section “7.2.8.4 Colour values” in the TIFF/IT specification.) [...]

Note that nothing here is actually valid criticism on the TIFF/IT file format, nor is it intended as such, on the condition that TIFF/IT is not mistaken for a flavor of TIFF, or an interchange or archival file format. If TIFF/IT is regarded as its own format, serving prepress needs perfectly fine, as it is intended, none of the above is anything other than a useful feature. Except for the badly chosen name, and the impractical and confusing reuse of another format's header and signature value.>>

Notice the 7.2.8.4 . So your IT8COLORTABLE is representing an ICC Color Profile, which is not used in the TIFF/A standard .

Basically what you have is a TIFF/IT file that is not a TIFF 6.0 file as is expected by imread(), and the TIFF/IT standard is incompatible with TIFF 6.0 in some regards. Especially as to what a LONG means in some circumstances. And your error message has to do with LONG.

So why the warning?

http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?t=27173

pronaldzito wrote "I believe this may be a bug in 64-bit libtiff where a TIFF IFD contains a data type of long with a value zero."

Possibly -- but the incompatibility in specifications would be more explanatory.

http://www.asmail.be/msg0055389673.html

Joris wrote

<<In theory, one should never copy tags that are unknown.

You may do otherwise, and many people do. But then you are open for trouble, for instance when copying a LONG value that is in fact intended to be a private IFD pointer.>>

More evidence that it is incompatibility in file formats.

Your file is not a TIFF file in the sense expected by MATLAB's imread(): it is a TIFF/IT file, which has a subtly different use of the tag structure and you are seeing the effect of it. You might have problems with the file as it is corrupt from the standpoint of TIFF readers.

[Image Analyst]

Moon.tif is a standard demo image that ships with MATLAB. I don't know how, but somehow you must have opened it and saved it in a different program with that weird format Walter mentioned, thus blowing away the original moon.tif file that ships with MATLAB. Unfortunately Answers won't let us attach the original moon.tif image that ships with MATLAB as a file (or any tiff images for that matter), I can attach it as a PNG file if you want and then you could call imread() followed by imwrite() to save the array as a MATLAB-friendly tiff image. Let me know.

[Walter Roberson]

You can zip the .tif and include the .zip

[li yan]

Thank you for you answer. I donot know that the moon.tif is a demo image shiped in Matlab and this moon.tif file is not loaded from Matlab. I mean sometimes it may give me a waring like that. Actually, I first encountered this problem, I readed other TIFF images with the function imread without a warning given above. Here, I give my simple code and upload my test images board.tif and moon.tif.

clear all; clc
im1 = imread('board.tif');%runing this statement will not give a warning
im2 = imread('moon.tif');%runing this statement will give a warning, even I change the file name to other name

[Walter Roberson]

R2014a reports

Warning: Zero count for IT8Site tag. 
Warning: Zero count for IT8ColorSequence tag. 
Warning: Zero count for IT8Header tag. 
Warning: Zero count for IT8ColorTable tag. 
Warning: Zero count for IT8ImageColorValue tag. 
Warning: Zero count for IT8BKGColorValue tag. 
Warning: Zero count for IT8ColorCharacterization tag.

[li yan]

Thank you very much for you test. Thus this is a Matlab bug and cannot be fixed? which statement will give a warning when runned?

[Walter Roberson]

No, the file you have is a TIFF/IT file, not a TIFF/A file. It is not a MATLAB bug: you are presenting it with invalid images.

The imread() will give the warning.

The ID of the warning is MATLAB:imagesci:tifftagsread:zeroComponentCount You can disable the warning using

warning('MATLAB:imagesci:tifftagsread:zeroComponentCount', 'off')

but keep in mind that you would be telling the software to not warn you about invalid files.

[li yan]

Thank you for your great answers! you opened my mind!

[Justin]

I was able to resolve the issue by using Photoshop to update the .tiff to a .tif by using the save a copy option. Afterwards, I was able to load the image into Matlab.

Answer 2

[Muhammad Usman Saleem]

Use the correct extension for tif or you have convert your image to some other data type image like unit8 ,unit16 or might be your image converted to RGB image or binary image.

[li yan]

thank you for you answer.