In this tutorial I will show you how you can read an image using Java. There are several kinds of image formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF etc. Java has built-in Image I/O API in javax.imageio package and it can be used to load external image formats into its BufferedImage formats.

By default, Image I/O supports image formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WBMP. It can also be extensible to support additional image formats for TIFF and JPEG 2000.

Image I/O recognizes the contents of the file as a JPEG format image, and decodes it into a BufferedImage which can be directly used by Java 2D.

Image can be load or read using following code snippets, where imagePath is the full path with image name from where the image can be read.

try {
  BufferedImage bufferedImage = ImageIO.read(new File(imagePath));
} catch (Exception e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
}

You can save the below sample image for reading and writing or extracting pixels then write back to the image using Java.

The whole source code is given below:

package com.roytuts.java.image.from.pixels;

import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import java.awt.image.ImagingOpException;
import java.io.File;

import javax.imageio.ImageIO;

public class ImageFromPixels {

	private static final String IMAGE_EXT_JPG = "jpg";
	private static final String IMAGE_EXT_JPEG = "jpeg";
	private static final String IMAGE_EXT_PNG = "png";
	private static final String IMAGE_EXT_GIF = "gif";
	/**
	 * Exception message to be thrown when allowed image types are not read
	 */
	public static final String IMAGE_ALLOW_TYPES = "Image types allowed - " + IMAGE_EXT_JPG + IMAGE_EXT_JPEG
			+ IMAGE_EXT_PNG + IMAGE_EXT_GIF;

	/**
	 * @param args
	 */
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		/**
		 * Read the image, Desert.jpg, from Desktop/Pictures
		 */
		BufferedImage bufferedImage = getImage("Jellyfish.jpg");
		/**
		 * Get pixels from the above image and display in the console
		 */
		int[][] pixels = getImageToPixels(bufferedImage);
		/**
		 * Get Image from array of pixels
		 */
		BufferedImage outputImage = getPixelsToImage(pixels);
		/**
		 * Write to the image file, DesertOutput.jpg, to desktop
		 */
		boolean isSuccess = writeImage(outputImage, "JellyfishOutput.jpg", IMAGE_EXT_JPEG);
		/**
		 * Show success or failed message
		 */
		if (isSuccess) {
			System.out.println("Image successfully written.");
		} else {
			System.out.println("Image writing failed.");
		}
	}

	/**
	 * Read image and return BufferedImage
	 *
	 * @param imageFullPath - full path of the image with image file name
	 */
	public static BufferedImage getImage(String imageFullPath) {
		BufferedImage bufferedImage = null;
		try {
			if (imageFullPath == null) {
				throw new NullPointerException("Image full path cannot be null or empty");
			}
			/**
			 * Check if the selected file is an image
			 */
			boolean isImage = isFileAnImage(imageFullPath);
			if (!isImage) {
				throw new ImagingOpException(IMAGE_ALLOW_TYPES);
			}
			String imagePath = imageFullPath;
			/**
			 * get BufferedImage and return it
			 */
			bufferedImage = ImageIO.read(new File(imagePath));
		} catch (Exception e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		return bufferedImage;
	}

	/**
	 * Get pixels in two dimensional array
	 *
	 * @param bufferedImage - get the BufferedImage instance from the image
	 */
	public static int[][] getImageToPixels(BufferedImage bufferedImage) {
		if (bufferedImage == null) {
			throw new IllegalArgumentException();
		}
		int h = bufferedImage.getHeight();
		int w = bufferedImage.getWidth();
		int[][] pixels = new int[h][w];
		for (int i = 0; i < h; i++) {
			/**
			 * get pixels from image
			 */
			bufferedImage.getRGB(0, i, w, 1, pixels[i], 0, w);
		}
		return pixels;
	}

	/**
	 * Get image from pixel array
	 *
	 * @param pixels - 2D array which contains pixel values
	 */
	public static BufferedImage getPixelsToImage(int[][] pixels) {
		BufferedImage bufferedImage = null;
		if (pixels == null) {
			throw new IllegalArgumentException();
		}
		int w = pixels[0].length;
		int h = pixels.length;
		bufferedImage = new BufferedImage(w, h, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
		for (int i = 0; i < h; i++) {
			bufferedImage.setRGB(0, i, w, 1, pixels[i], 0, w);
		}
		return bufferedImage;
	}

	/**
	 * Write to the image file
	 *
	 * @param bufferedImage - image
	 * @param fileName      - output file name with extension
	 * @param format        - output image file format
	 */
	public static boolean writeImage(BufferedImage bufferedImage, String fileName, String format) {
		boolean isSuccess = true;
		if (bufferedImage == null || format == null) {
			throw new IllegalArgumentException();
		}
		try {
			File file = new File(fileName);
			/**
			 * write BufferedImage to a file
			 */
			ImageIO.write(bufferedImage, format, file);
		} catch (Exception e) {
		}
		return isSuccess;
	}

	/**
	 * Check a file is an image
	 *
	 * @param imageName - image file name with extension
	 */
	private static boolean isFileAnImage(String imageName) {
		if (imageName == null) {
			throw new NullPointerException("Image full path cannot be null or empty");
		}
		File imageFile = new File(imageName);
		String ext = getFileExtension(imageFile);
		if (IMAGE_EXT_GIF.equalsIgnoreCase(ext) || IMAGE_EXT_JPEG.equalsIgnoreCase(ext)
				|| IMAGE_EXT_JPG.equalsIgnoreCase(ext) || IMAGE_EXT_PNG.equalsIgnoreCase(ext)) {
			return true;
		}
		return false;
	}

	/**
	 * Get file extension from the file
	 *
	 * @param file - file
	 */
	public static String getFileExtension(File file) {
		if (file == null) {
			throw new NullPointerException("Image file cannot be null");
		}
		String name = file.getName();
		int lastDotIndex = name.lastIndexOf(".");
		if (lastDotIndex > 0 && lastDotIndex < (name.length() - 1)) {
			return name.substring(lastDotIndex + 1).toLowerCase();
		}
		return "";
	}

}

The above code first extract pixels from the image then those pixels are used to construct the original image.

Source Code

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That’s all. Thanks for reading.