These samples are normal bits in the encoded (e.g. compressed) stream of
each tile or row of the image. However, when considering the photometric
interpretation of an image these samples should be discarded. They are
only relevant for multiband.
For the most part we previously rejected these images due to a mismatch
between sample count and the color as indicated by the interpretation.
Only, for alpha we never really verified if the extra channel is indeed
alpha or something unrelated. We don't have a perfect solution as
GeoTiff motivates us having a MultiBand pseudo-color output
configuration that has no related photometric interpretation and borrows
the usual gray tone instead. We can only really distinguish this from a
gray-alpha image through looking at the values of the ExtraSamples
vector. Then again we do not yet support GrayAlpha anyways.
As a simplification for the discarding process we only support full-byte
extra samples and require all samples to be the same bit-depth, not only
those which we return. This is blessed by Tiff's recommendations for
baseline decoding as well as libtiff.
This was found through the fax4 decoding that is always bilevel.
No longer silently ignore an unknown color type when a photometric
interpretation requires an inversion. DICOM requires that WhiteIsZero
and BlackIsZero are only used for samples-per-pixel=1 but we do not
strictly enforce that early. Previously for the result Multiband color
we just ignored the tag which is also not right.
Prepares extensibility for the eventual case of supporting multi-planar
image layouts that are to be written into a multi-planar buffer as
indicated by the caller in some way (possibly not via read_*_bytes but a
method taking a wrapper around the output buffer instead). Through the
struct we can later add an indicator that can be used by the caller to
decide between methods of fetching the pixel data as appropriate.
A. Molzer