How to replace libpng, libtiff etc with GDI+ Bitmap (Load into cv::Mat via GDI+)

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I'm working on a project that uses OpenCV and Tesseract. Both libraries are based on libpng, libtiff, libjpeg, etc.. to load/save image files.

But Tesseract (based on Leptonica) uses older versions of these libraries which have incompatible parameters. So I cannot use the same image libraries for both: OpenCV an Tesseract.

So if I compile my project dynamically, I will have to deliver a bunch of DLLs with my project. And if I compile statically I produce a huge output file blown up by several megabytes.

This is UGLY. I don't want that.

Another problem is that nearly all open source projects - mainly developed in Linux/MAC world - do not support Unicode if compiled on Windows. Internally they all pass a std::string to fopen(). On Linux a workaround may function: Encoding the path with UTF8, but on Windows it will not. So a Japanese user cannot open an image file in a folder with a Japanese name. While Microsoft already in the early 1990's made big efforts to convert the entire Windows NT operating system to be 100% Unicode compatible, the majority of open source projects (like libpng) 20 years later still does not support passing a path via std::wstring.

The OpenCV commands imread() and imwrite() must NOT be used on Windows if you want to create an international project!

So, what I want is: Eliminate libtiff, libpng, libjpeg completely from my project:

In OpenCV comment out:

// #define HAVE_JASPER
// #define HAVE_JPEG
// #define HAVE_PNG
// #define HAVE_TIFF
etc..

In Tesseract / Leptonica:

#define  HAVE_LIBJPEG   0
#define  HAVE_LIBTIFF   0
#define  HAVE_LIBPNG    0
#define  HAVE_LIBZ      0
#define  HAVE_LIBGIF    0
#define  HAVE_LIBUNGIF  0
etc..

..and use GDI+ instead that is part of the Windows operating system and that supports loading/saving BMP, TIF, PNG, JPG, GIF. And GDI+ is Unicode compatible.

I know that this can be done with a few lines of code, but such a usefull class is missing in the OpenCV project. My first trials showed that this is not as trivial as it seems on the first look because a lot of conversions have to be done.

I wrote a ready-to-use class for that purpose. You can download it here: OpenCV / Tesseract: How to replace libpng, libtiff etc with GDI+ Bitmap (Load into cv::Mat via GDI+)

I hope my useful class will be included into the OpenCV project for all Windows users in the world.