Mastering OpenCV 4 with Python

File extensions

Although the images we are going to manipulate in OpenCV can be seen as rectangular arrays of RGB triplets (in the case of RGB images), they are not necessarily created, stored, or transmitted in that format. In this sense, some file formats, such as GIF, PNG, bitmaps, or JPEG, use different forms of compression (lossless or lossy) to represent images more efficiently.

In this way, and for the sake of completeness, a brief introduction to these image files is given here, with a special focus on the file formats supported by OpenCV. The following file formats (with the associated file extensions) are supported by OpenCV:

• Windows bitmaps: *.bmp and *.dib
• JPEG files: *.jpeg, *.jpg, and *.jpe
• JPEG 2000 files: *.jp2
• Portable Network ...