PixelArrays

PixelArrays are a fundamental data structure used to represent digital images as a grid of pixels. Each element in a PixelArray corresponds to a single pixel position, and may store one or more color channels or intensity values. PixelArrays are used across image processing, computer vision, and computer graphics as the canonical in-memory representation of image data.

In gray-scale images, a PixelArray typically has one value per position. Color images may store three channels (RGB) or four channels (RGBA). Data can be organized in two major layouts: interleaved, where color channels are stored sequentially for each pixel, and planar, where each channel is stored in a separate contiguous plane. Common data types include 8-bit unsigned integers, 16-bit integers, and floating-point values, with 0..255, 0..65535, or normalized 0.0..1.0 ranges. The arrangement of rows and columns in memory often follows row-major order, though column-major order is used in some systems.

PixelArrays support indexing and slicing to access or modify pixels, as well as operations such as cropping, resizing, color-space conversion, and normalization. Performance considerations include memory locality and tiling; some libraries provide views or slices that avoid copying data.

In practice, PixelArrays underlie many APIs and file formats, and are implemented as multi-dimensional arrays in programming languages and libraries such as NumPy, OpenCV, and Web APIs. They provide a uniform abstraction for both image data and processed results, enabling a wide range of image analysis and rendering workflows.