2006.11.08 17:07 "[Tiff] OJPEG - two troublesome flavours", by Joris Van Damme

Folks,

This is to inform you that I've received two files that the current OJPEG decoder in CVS can't handle. Details are below. I mean to fix this as soon as possible, which is likely by January next year.

If you find any other files that don't seem to work, please don't hesitate to mail me, unless you know for a fact they correspond to the descriptions below of the files sent to me already.

* One seems to be written by "Kofax standard Multi-Page TIFF Storage Filter v3.03.000", judging from the Software tag. Seeing they write OJPEG, I take it they mean the word "standard" a bit ironically.

LibTiff reports the error "Fractional scanline not read".

Strangely, my own proprietary codec that works much the same as the new OJPEG decoder in LibTiff, handles this file just fine. This indicates there is probably some trouble in the surrounding code in LibTiff, possibly some scanline length calculation, and not in the actual OJPEG codec.

* The other one seems to be written by "Microsoft Office Document Scanning 11.0.1897.00" judging from that same Software tag.

The IFD indicates 1 sample per pixel, photometric MinIsBlack. Yet, the JPEG compressed data contains three channels. LibTiff properly errors out, saying "JPEG compressed data indicates unexpected number of samples", which makes sense.

The JPEG compressed data, by itself, is legit. Even though it has three channels, it doesn't contain any obvious color judging from a visual inspection.

It is not enterely clear to me what would be the best solution. Depending on the writer's intention, which is anyone's guess, I may either want to add a hack to the surrounding library that corrects the IFD to read 3 samples per pixel, photometric YCbCr, or I may either want to add a hack inside the OJPEG codec to return the first Y sample of the JPEG data only. The first option would be correct if the writer's intention is to actually (not) interchange grayscale data, the second would be correct if the lack of color in this particular file's JPEG compressed data is merely coïncidence.

Best regards,

Joris Van Damme
info@awaresystems.be
http://www.awaresystems.be/
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