How to read SGI images in Java (Tutorial)

Why do SGI Images cause issues for Java Developers?

ImageIO cannot read SGI file types by default so existing Java Applications will not work with them. If you have an existing Java Application using ImageIO you will find it cannot process these images.

In this post, I will cover how to upgrade ImageIO to support SGI files so existing Java Applications which use ImageIO will work (often without having to make any code changes) and how to read SGI files in JDeli directly.

What options are there for reading SGI files in Java?

Java does not read SGI images by default however JDeli offers pure Java support for SGI files and can be added as an ImageIO plugin, which we will be using for this tutorial.

If you are looking for a free solution, there is SGI support in the Twelve Monkeys ImageIO plugin. In this article we will be using our JDeli pure Java library to read SGI files.

How to upgrade ImageIO to read SGI files

It’s actually very simple and can be done without rewriting your existing code!

For example, the code below does not work with ImageIO for SGI images

// Read SGI image into Java with ImageIO

BufferedImage bufferedImage = ImageIO.read(new File("ImageFile.sgi"));

Steps to fix with JDeli:

• Download the JDeli trial jar with our ImageIO plugin
• Follow the support documentation to install

How to read an SGI image in Java with JDeli

1. Add JDeli to your class or module path. (download the trial jar).
2. Create a File handle, InputStream pointing to the raw SGI image. You can also use a byte[] containing the image data.
3. Read the SGI image into a BufferedImage

and the Java code to read SGI with JDeli…

File file = new File("/path/to/image.sgi"));

BufferedImage image = JDeli.read(file);

Other useful SGI links

• JDeli SGI support
• Related articles on our support site.
• What is SGI?