I am analysing very large images in R, in the order of tens of thousands of pixels square. Unfortunately, even with 64 GB RAM, these images sometimes fail to fit into memory, and when they do I can only open one at a time, precluding parallelisation.
My current strategy is to load them using the JPEG or TIFF packages. e.g.:
image <- readJPEG('image.jpg')
However, as I am only performing simple mathematical manipulations (summing, thresholding etc.) that could be performed piece-by-piece, is it possible to only open part of an image at a time by specifying the dimensions to load? If so, I could write a loop to open 1024 x 1024 sized tiles. The JPEG and TIFF packages do not offer an option to do this.
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