How can I read an HEIC image in matlab?

Question

I have an HEIC image from my iPhone (it contains depth data) and I want to import it in Matlab (on Mac). but imread() does not support this format. How could I achive this anyway?

Answer 1

If you use homebrew to manage packages on your Mac, you can install ImageMagick with HEIC support (via libde265) like this (order is important):

brew install libde265
brew install imagemagick

You should then be able to run the following command to check you have HEIC support:

magick identify -list format | grep -Ei "HEIC|HEIF"

Sample Output

  Format  Module    Mode  Description
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  3FR  DNG       r--   Hasselblad CFV/H3D39II
  3G2  MPEG      r--   Media Container
  3GP  MPEG      r--   Media Container
  AAI* AAI       rw+   AAI Dune image
   AI  PDF       rw-   Adobe Illustrator CS2
  ART* ART       rw-   PFS: 1st Publisher Clip Art
  ARW  DNG       r--   Sony Alpha Raw Image Format
  AVI  MPEG      r--   Microsoft Audio/Visual Interleaved
  AVS* AVS       rw+   AVS X image
  BGR* BGR       rw+   Raw blue, green, and red samples
  ...
  ...
  HEIC* HEIC      rw-   High Efficiency Image Format      <--- THERE IT IS

If all that works, you should be able to inspect one of your HEIC images with:

magick identify -verbose SomeImage.HEIC

Then we should be able to extract whatever you want from the image and put it into some format that Matlab can read - but it is all pretty new and I'll need feedback from you as to progress...