Opencv - Reading A 16 Bit Grayscale Image

I'm trying to read a 16 bit grayscale image using OpenCV 2.4 in Python, but it seems to be loading it as 8 bit. I'm doing: im = cv2.imread(path,0) print im [[25 25 28 ..., 0 0

Solution 1:

Figured it out. In case anyone else runs into this problem:

im = cv2.imread(path,-1)

Setting the flag to 0, to load as grayscale, seems to default to 8 bit. Setting the flag to -1 loads the image as is.

Solution 2:

To improve readability use the flag cv2.IMREAD_ANYDEPTH

image = cv2.imread( path, cv2.IMREAD_ANYDEPTH )

Solution 3:

I had the same issue (16-bit .tif loading as 8-bit using cv2.imread). However, using the -1 flag didn't help. Instead, I was able to load 16-bit images using the tifffile package.