PIL TypeError: Cannot handle this data type
I solved it different way.
Problem Situation:
When working with gray image or binary image, if the numpy array shape is (height, width, 1)
, this error will be raised also.
For example, a 32 by 32 pixel gray image (value 0 to 255)
np_img = np.random.randint(low=0, high=255, size=(32, 32, 1), dtype=np.uint8)
# np_img.shape == (32, 32, 1)
pil_img = Image.fromarray(np_img)
will raise TypeError: Cannot handle this data type: (1, 1, 1), |u1
Solution:
If the image shape is like (32, 32, 1)
, reduce dimension into (32, 32)
np_img = np.squeeze(np_img, axis=2) # axis=2 is channel dimension
pil_img = Image.fromarray(np_img)
This time it works!!
Additionally, please make sure the dtype
is uint8
(for gray) or bool
(for binary).
tl;dr
Does x
contain uint
values in [0, 255]? If not and especially if x
ranges from 0 to 1, that is the reason for the error.
Explanation
Most image libraries (e.g. matplotlib, opencv, scikit-image) have two ways of representing images:
- as
uint
with values ranging from 0 to 255. - as
float
with values ranging from 0 to 1.
The latter is more convenient when performing operations between images and thus is more popular in the field of Computer Vision. However PIL seems to not support it for RGB images.
If you take a look here
it seems that when you try to read an image from an array, if the array has a shape of (height, width, 3)
it automatically assumes it's an RGB image and expects it to have a dtype
of uint8
!
In your case, however, you have an RBG image with float
values from 0 to 1.
Solution
You can fix it by converting your image to the format expected by PIL:
im = Image.fromarray((x * 255).astype(np.uint8))
In my case it was only because I forgotted to add the "RGB" arg in the "fromarray" func.
pil_img = Image.fromarray(np_img, 'RGB')