How to import ".heic" image file of Apple phone by matlab?

I have a lot of ".heic" image files taken by Apple phones, and I want to read them into matlab to analyze them, but it seems that the imread function does not support this kind of format. Is there any way to do this in matlab? thanks in advance!

os: win10

matlab2021a

[DGM]

Unless something has changed, I'm pretty sure you're going to have to convert them to a different format using some external tools. ImageMagick could batch convert them if it has support for HEIC. Depending on what analysis you need to do, you might want to be careful to minimize the amount of added degradation imposed by any conversion.

[cui,xingxing]

Thanks for your reply, it was very easy to batch convert the ".heic" image files to the ".jpg" format I wanted with imageMagick software. I refer here to do it.

cd myImgsFolder
mogrify -format jpg *.heic

or specify full output dir path

mogrify -format jpg -path D:\dstImgs *.heic

then, I can easily import the ".jpg" image file in matlab for analysis

[cui,xingxing]

Also, I found an easier to use widget, "iMazing HEIC Converter"， free and easy to use

[Walter Roberson]

We recommend against using jpg for serious analysis. Use a lossless format such as png or tiff

[DGM]

Afaik, HEIC is normally lossy (with a lossless option), so that bridge has probably already been burned. Of course, I'm not saying that compounding the damage by using JPG would be good (hence my comment on conversion), but I just thought it's worth noting that (some) damage has (probably) already been done.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

I've also used ImageMagick, at the suggestion of people on the Mathworks Image Processing toolbox team. I got the images from someone with a iPhone who didn't know she had options for how to format the image for sending. She could have used a different format but HEIC was the default. She didn't need to resnap, just needed to adjust some settings before transmitting, like this:

It’s easy on the Mac. For interactive use, use the Preview app to export any image to another format. For command-line scripting, use /usr/bin/sips.

For iPhone users, change a setting in order to share photos as JPEG rather than HEIC:

Settings -> Photos -> Transfer to Mac or PC -> Automatic

The IPT team knows about the issue (for a long time now) and it's on their to-do list. In fact many of them use Apple products. They said that requests sent in to [e-mail] influence their priority list, so let's have everyone send in their request to have read (especially) and write capability for HEIC format image files.

[Ahmad]

thx