Read PNG from memory buffer (without dumping it into a file)

Hello,

I have some PNG images saved in base64 strings. I can easily load them into memory and decode the base64 to obtain the binary data of the PNG file. How do I read those PNG data? The obvious solution is to dump it into a file, but that's incredibly slow, especially when I have billions of PNG already loaded into memory.

I had a look at how imread works, and at the very end there is a c library that takes the filename and returns the PNG content. Is there a way to read the PNG data without saving it into a file?

Thank you,

Alessandro