### 28.1.8 Extracting data from images

##### Printing out information about an image.

The about command can be used to print out a brief description of an image object, which it takes as its only argument.

##### Obtaining the size of an image.

The size of an image can be obtained by using the size command.

- size takes img, an image object.
- size(img) returns a list of two integers representing the width and the height of img (in that order).

##### Obtaining pixel data.

Channel data can be extracted from image objects to matrices by using the [] operator or the channel_data command.

- Let img be an image object.
- The command img[chn ⟨,x,y ⟨,w,h ⟩⟩], where
  - chn is a channel index, which should be either a nonnegative integer or red for the red channel, green for the green channel, blue for the blue channel, grey for the grayscale channel resp. tran for the transparency channel,
  - (optionally) x, y are integers and
  - (optionally) w, h are positive integers (if these are given, then x and y must also be given),
  returns
  - the full matrix of the channel chn if no optional arguments are given,
  - the chn component of the pixel (x,y) if w and h are not given,
  - the matrix of pixel data for the channel chn in the rectangle with upper left corner (x,y) and lower right corner (x+w−1,y+h−1) if x, y, w and h are given.
- If chn=grey and img is a color image, then the returned pixel value(s) are obtained by averaging the color channels.
- The channel_data command extracts a channel (sub)matrix. Precisely, channel_data(img,args) is equivalent to img[args], where img is an image object and args is a sequence of arguments as described above.

##### Flattening images.

The flatten command returns a list representation of an image, which is suitable for e.g. passing the image to a neural network. It accepts a single argument, an image object img, and returns the list in which the pixel data is stored row by row, with individual channel values for the same pixel occupying consecutive entries in the list. (See the MNIST example in Section 22.2.2.)