@thi.ng/pixel

[!NOTE] This is one of 201 standalone projects, maintained as part of the @thi.ng/umbrella monorepo and anti-framework.

🚀 Please help me to work full-time on these projects by sponsoring me on GitHub. Thank you! ❤️

• About
  • Integer pixel formats
  • Indexed, palette-based pixel formats
  • Floating point pixel formats
  • Filtered image sampling and resizing
    • Filters
    • Wrap mode
• Status
• Support packages
• Related packages
• Installation
• Dependencies
• Usage examples
• API
• Authors
• License

About

Typedarray integer & float pixel buffers w/ customizable formats, blitting, drawing, convolution.

[!IMPORTANT] In July 2024 this package was restructured and split-up to extract some features into smaller more focused packages:

• @thi.ng/pixel-convolve
• @thi.ng/pixel-dominant-colors

• Buffer creation from HTML image elements or canvas w/ opt resize & format conversion (browser only)
• 12 packed integer and 6 floating point preset formats (see table below)
• Palette-based indexed pixel formats
• Buffer-to-buffer blitting w/ automatic format conversion
• Buffer-to-canvas blitting (incl. offscreen canvas support)
• Buffer-to-buffer blending w/ Porter-Duff operators
• Pre/post-multiply alpha
• Region / sub-image extraction
• Single-channel manipulation / extraction / replacement / conversion
• Accessors for normalized channel value
• Image sampling & filtered resizing
  • Filters: nearest neighbor, bilinear, bicubic
  • Wrap behaviors: clamp, wrap, repeat
• Invert image
• XY coordinate-based pixel & channel-only accessors (w/ optional bounds checking)
• Declarative custom pixel formats with optimized code generation
• HTML canvas creation & ImageData utilities

Integer pixel formats

All integer formats use the canvas native ABGR 32bit format as common intermediate for conversions. During conversion to ABGR, channels with sizes smaller than 8 bits will be scaled appropriately to ensure an as full-range and as linear as possible mapping. E.g. a 4 bit channel will be scaled by 255 / 15 = 17.

Format specs can freely control channel layout within current limits:

• Channel sizes: 1 - 32 bits.
• Storage: 8, 16 or 32 bits per pixel

Custom formats can be defined via defIntFormat().

Format ID	Bits per pixel	Description
ALPHA8	8	8 bit channel (alpha only)
GRAY8	8	8 bit single channel (grayscale conv)
GRAY_ALPHA8	16	8 bit single channel (grayscale conv), 8 bit alpha
GRAY16	16	16 bit single channel (grayscale conv)
GRAY_ALPHA16	32	16 bit single channel (grayscale conv), 16 bit alpha
ARGB4444	16	4 channels @ 4 bits each
ARGB1555	16	5 bits each for RGB, 1 bit alpha
RGB565	16	5 bits red, 6 bits green, 5 bits blue
RGB888	32 (24 effective)	3 channels @ 8 bits each
ARGB8888	32	4 channels @ 8 bits each
BGR888	32 (24 effective)	3 channels @ 8 bits each
ABGR8888	32	4 channels @ 8 bits each

• ALPHA8 is mapped from/to ABGR alpha channel
• GRAY8/16, GRAY_ALPHA8/16 compute grayscale/luminance when converting from ABGR and in return produce grayscale ABGR
• In all built-in formats supporting it, the alpha channel always occupies the most-significant bits (up to format size)

Indexed, palette-based pixel formats

Instead of storing colors directly for each pixel, palette-based formats are supported which only store a color index per pixel (e.g. as is done for GIF and/or indexed PNG formats). These formats can be created via the defIndexed() family of functions.

Floating point pixel formats

Strided floating point format presets for use with floatBuffer(). New formats can be defined via defFloatFormat().

Format ID	Channel count	Description
FLOAT_GRAY	1	Single channel / grayscale
FLOAT_GRAY_ALPHA	2	Grayscale and alpha channel
FLOAT_GRAY_RANGE	1	Grayscale (user defined value range)
FLOAT_NORMAL	3	Normal map (signed values)
FLOAT_RGB	3	Red, Green, Blue
FLOAT_RGBA	4	Red, Green, Blue, Alpha

• All color channels are unclamped (but can be clamped via buf.clamp()). For conversion to packed int formats assumed to contain normalized data (i.e. [0..1] interval, with exception of FLOAT_NORMAL which uses [-1..1] range)
• Conversion between float formats is currently unsupported

Filtered image sampling and resizing

Available (and optimized) for both integer & floating point formats, image samplers can be created with the following filters & wrap modes:

Filters

• "nearest" - nearest neighbor
• "linear" - bilinear interpolation
• "cubic" - bicubic interpolation

Wrap mode

• "clamp" - outside values return 0
• "wrap" - infinite tiling
• "repeat" - edge pixels are repeated

import { intBuffer, defSampler, ABGR8888 } from "@thi.ng/pixel";

const src = intBuffer(4, 4, ABGR8888);

// fill w/ random colors
src.forEach((_,i) => 0xff000000 | Math.random() * 0xffffff);

// create bilinear sampler w/ repeated edge pixels
const sampler = defSampler(src, "linear", "repeat");

// sample at fractional positions (even outside image)
sampler(-1.1, 0.5).toString(16)
// 'ff79643a'

// resize image to 1024x256 using bicubic sampling
const img = src.resize(1024, 256, "cubic");

Filter
"nearest"
"linear"
"cubic"

Status

STABLE - used in production

Search or submit any issues for this package

Support packages

• @thi.ng/pixel-convolve - Extensible bitmap image convolution, kernel presets, normal map & image pyramid generation
• @thi.ng/pixel-dither - Extensible image dithering w/ various algorithm presets
• @thi.ng/pixel-dominant-colors - k-means based dominant color extraction from images/pixel buffers
• @thi.ng/pixel-io-geotiff - GeoTIFF reader support for @thi.ng/pixel
• @thi.ng/pixel-io-netpbm - Multi-format NetPBM reader & writer support for @thi.ng/pixel
• @thi.ng/pixel-io-pfm - Portable FloatMap image format support for @thi.ng/pixel

Related packages

• @thi.ng/color - Array-based color types, CSS parsing, conversions, transformations, declarative theme generation, gradients, presets
• @thi.ng/porter-duff - Porter-Duff operators for packed ints & float-array alpha compositing
• @thi.ng/rasterize - Headless 2D shape drawing, filling & rasterization for arbitrary targets/purposes (no canvas required)
• @thi.ng/shader-ast - DSL to define shader code in TypeScript and cross-compile to GLSL, JS and other targets
• @thi.ng/webgl - WebGL & GLSL abstraction layer

Installation

yarn add @thi.ng/pixel

ESM import:

import * as pix from "@thi.ng/pixel";

Browser ESM import:

<script type="module" src="https://esm.run/@thi.ng/pixel"></script>

JSDelivr documentation

For Node.js REPL:

const pix = await import("@thi.ng/pixel");

Package sizes (brotli'd, pre-treeshake): ESM: 7.35 KB

Dependencies

• @thi.ng/api
• @thi.ng/canvas
• @thi.ng/checks
• @thi.ng/errors
• @thi.ng/math
• @thi.ng/porter-duff

Note: @thi.ng/api is in most cases a type-only import (not used at runtime)

Usage examples

26 projects in this repo's /examples directory are using this package:

Screenshot	Description	Live demo	Source
	Interactive image processing (adaptive threshold)	Demo	Source
	ASCII art raymarching with thi.ng/shader-ast & thi.ng/text-canvas	Demo	Source
	Interactive & reactive image blurhash generator	Demo	Source
	Color palette generation via dominant color extraction from uploaded images	Demo	Source
	2.5D hidden line visualization of digital elevation files (DEM)	Demo	Source
	Barnsley fern IFS fractal renderer	Demo	Source
	Pixel buffer manipulations	Demo	Source
	Matrix-based image color adjustments	Demo	Source
	Showcase of various dithering algorithms	Demo	Source
	Randomized 4-point 2D color gradient image generator	Demo	Source
	Image dithering and remapping using indexed palettes	Demo	Source
	Normal map creation/conversion basics	Demo	Source
	Interactive pixel sorting tool using thi.ng/color & thi.ng/pixel	Demo	Source
	RGB waveform image analysis	Demo	Source
	Image-based Poisson-disk sampling	Demo	Source
	Port-Duff image compositing / alpha blending	Demo	Source
	Steering behavior drawing with alpha-blended shapes	Demo	Source
	Basic usage of the declarative rdom-forms generator	Demo	Source
	Responsive image gallery with tag-based Jaccard similarity ranking	Demo	Source
	2D scenegraph & image map based geometry manipulation	Demo	Source
	WebGL & Canvas2D textured tunnel shader	Demo	Source
	Fork-join worker-based raymarch renderer (JS/CPU only)	Demo	Source
	Textmode image warping w/ 16bit color output	Demo	Source
	Multi-layer vectorization & dithering of bitmap images	Demo	Source
	Visual comparison of biased vs. unbiased normal vectors projected on the surface of a sphere	Demo	Source
	Minimal multi-pass / GPGPU example	Demo	Source

API

Generated API docs

import * as pix from "@thi.ng/pixel";
import { SRC_OVER_I } from "@thi.ng/porter-duff";
import { pixelCanvas2d } from "@thi.ng/canvas";

import IMG from "../assets/haystack.jpg";
import LOGO from "../assets/logo-64.png";

const [img, logo] = await Promise.all([IMG, LOGO].map((x) => imageFromURL(x)));

// init 16bit int RGB pixel buffer from image (resized to 256x256)
const buf = intBufferFromImage(img, RGB565, 256, 256);

// create grayscale buffer for logo and use Porter-Duff operator to
// composite with main image. Since the logo has transparency, we
// need to premultiply alpha first...
intBufferFromImage(logo, GRAY_ALPHA8).premultiply().blend(SRC_OVER_I, buf, {
    dx: 10,
    dy: 10,
});

// extract sub-image
// (method returns undefined if result region is < 1 pixel)
const region = buf.getRegion(32, 96, 128, 64)!;
// copy region back at new position
region.blit(buf, { dx: 96, dy: 32 });

// or alternatively blit buf into itself
// buf.blit(buf, { dx: 96, dy: 32, sx: 32, sy: 96, w: 128, h: 64 });

// create html canvas
// (returns obj of canvas & 2d context)
const { canvas } = pixelCanvas2d(buf.width, buf.height * 3, document.body);

// write pixel buffer to canvas
buf.blitCanvas(canvas);

// manipulate single color channel
const id = 0;
const ch = buf.getChannel(id).invert();
for (let y = 0; y < ch.height; y += 2) {
    for (let x = (y >> 1) & 1; x < ch.width; x += 2) {
        ch.setAt(x, y, 0xff);
    }
}
// replace original channel
buf.setChannel(id, ch);
// write pixel buffer to new position
buf.blitCanvas(canvas, { y: buf.height });
// create & write grayscale version
buf.as(GRAY8).blitCanvas(canvas, { y: buf.height * 2 });

Authors

• Karsten Schmidt (Main author)
• Askar Yusupov

If this project contributes to an academic publication, please cite it as:

@misc{thing-pixel,
  title = "@thi.ng/pixel",
  author = "Karsten Schmidt and others",
  note = "https://thi.ng/pixel",
  year = 2019
}

License

© 2019 - 2025 Karsten Schmidt // Apache License 2.0