matlab imshow not working with certain tiff files

Question

I get the following errors when trying to run imshow with some tiff files:

??? Error using ==> imageDisplayValidateParams>validateCData at 114
Unsupported dimension

Error in ==> imageDisplayValidateParams at 31
common_args.CData = validateCData(common_args.CData,image_type);

Error in ==> imageDisplayParseInputs at 79
common_args = imageDisplayValidateParams(common_args);

Error in ==> imshow at 199
  [common_args,specific_args] = ...

Error in ==> CellArea at 6
imshow('A1 x20.tiff')

I initially stored the image data in a matlab variable using imread and when that didn't work with imshow I used it to just get the image directly with the filename; the error messages are the same.

The problem images I'm trying to analyze are 1032x778 tiff files. I made a sample tif image using Paint and the function has no problems with it. Does anybody know what is causing these errors and how to get the image to display? Thanks

Here is the infinfo output for one of the images, as requested

                 Filename: 'A1 x20.tiff'
              FileModDate: '14-Oct-2013 15:49:26'
                 FileSize: 3211714
                   Format: 'tif'
            FormatVersion: []
                    Width: 1032
                   Height: 778
                 BitDepth: 32
                ColorType: 'truecolor'
          FormatSignature: [73 73 42 0]
                ByteOrder: 'little-endian'
           NewSubFileType: 0
            BitsPerSample: [8 8 8 8]
              Compression: 'Uncompressed'
PhotometricInterpretation: 'RGB'
             StripOffsets: 8
          SamplesPerPixel: 4
             RowsPerStrip: 4.2950e+009
          StripByteCounts: 3211584
              XResolution: []
              YResolution: []
           ResolutionUnit: 'None'
                 Colormap: []
      PlanarConfiguration: 'Chunky'
                TileWidth: []
               TileLength: []
              TileOffsets: []
           TileByteCounts: []
              Orientation: 1
                FillOrder: 1
         GrayResponseUnit: 0.0100
           MaxSampleValue: [255 255 255 255]
           MinSampleValue: 0
             Thresholding: 1
                   Offset: 3211592

doing x = imread('A1 x20.tiff') and then whos x gives

Name x
Size 778x1032x4
Bytes 3211584
Class uint8
Attributes

You have to first use imread on the file. Type x = imread('A1 x20.tiff'); and then imshow(x). If it doesn't work, type whos x and tell us what you get — Luis Mendo
Daniel - Do you mean imfinfo? Updated the original post with that information — ANG-MO
@LiamFisher is it possible your tiff file is storing several frames? what is the output of whos x? try imshow( x(:,:,1:3) ) — Shai
Imshow with that input works! Can you explain more about the multiple frames? — ANG-MO

Shai Shai · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-10T16:44:03

For some reason your tiff file has four channels (nothing to do with multiple frames): size(x,3)==4. I guess the fourth is an alpha-channel.
imshow can display either gray scale images, indexed images (with size(x,3)==1) or true-color images (with size(x,3)==3). Your image had 4 channels and thus imshow failed.
Asking inshow to work only on the first three channels made the trick:

 >> imshow( x(:,:,1:3) );

matlab imshow not working with certain tiff files

1 Answers