How libvips works: VIPS Reference Manual

Internals

Internals — A high-level technical overview of libvips’s evaluation system

Compared to most image processing libraries, VIPS needs little RAM and runs quickly, especially on machines with more than one CPU. VIPS achieves this improvement by only keeping the pixels currently being processed in RAM and by having an efficient, threaded image IO system. This page explains how these features are implemented.

Images

VIPS images have three dimensions: width, height and bands. Bands usually (though not always) represent colour. These three dimensions can be any size up to 2 ** 31 elements. Every band element in an image has to have the same format. A format is an 8-, 16- or 32-bit int, signed or unsigned, 32- or 64-bit float, and 64- or 128-bit complex.