The Cornell Box Syndrome

OpenImageIO is a library for reading and writing images, and a bunch of related classes, utilities, and applications. Main features include:

• Extremely simple but powerful ImageInput and ImageOutput APIs for reading and writing 2D images that is format agnostic — that is, a “client app” doesn’t need to know the details about any particular image file formats. Specific formats are implemented by DLL/DSO plugins.

• Format plugins for TIFF, JPEG/JFIF, OpenEXR, PNG, HDR/RGBE, and ICO formats. More coming! The plugins are really good at understanding all the strange corners of the image formats, and are very careful about preserving image metadata (including Exif, GPS, and IPTC data).

• An ImageCache class that transparently manages a cache so that it can access truly vast amounts of image data (thousands of image files totaling tens of GB) very efficiently using only a tiny amount (tens of megabytes at most) of runtime memory. Additionally, a TextureSystem class provides filtered MIP-map texture lookups, atop the nice caching behavior of ImageCache.

• Several image tools based on these classes, including iinfo (print detailed info about images), iconvert (convert among formats, data types, or modify metadata), idiff (compare images), igrep (search images for matching metadata). Because these tools are based on ImageInput/ImageOutput, they work with any image formats for which ImageIO plugins are available.

• A really nice image viewer, iv, also based on OpenImageIO classes (and so will work with any formats for which plugins are available).

• Supported on Linux and OS X, with Windows support coming (volunteers would be helpful!).

• All available under the BSD license, so you may modify it and use it in both open source or proprietary apps.

Why do you care ?

Well, the mastermind behind it is Larry Gritz (BMRT, Pixar, ExLuna, Gelato, and now Sony Imageworks). This guy knows a thing or two about APIs and performance.

I have been following the developper list for a few days, and it looks like this is going to be very helpful soon. I am especially interested in the texture cache…

Just in case you didn’t know, Pixar has been maintaining a public archive of siggraph / technical papers they published over the years.
It goes from the latest ones all the way to some seminal publications, like the cook-torrance shading model, or antialiased shadow maps. An occasion to remember that they invented pretty much all the stuff we use everyday…