How to open .RAW file with bizarre custom header

Question

I have a bizarre .raw file in the following format, that I need to open for a class project. It has the following structure using the example of a 487x414 photo:

• The number of rows is two un-signed bytes (01E7)
• The number of columns is two un-signed bytes (019E)
• The number of bits representing each pixel (this will always be 8)
• The actual picture data

The project is to run edge detection on the .raw file, but the professor said I should be able to open it with any old image editing software (apparently, he expects me to be prompted with a window where I set the number of bytes in the header), so I tried the following to no avail:

• Paint.net
• Photoshop Elements
• Adobe Lightroom
• ImageMagick
• Gimp
• DCRaw

I'm dual booting Ubuntu and Windows, so if anyone has any ideas on how I could get this file displayed, (I'm currently trying to load it into OpenCV as a histogram, but I would like to have something to check my result against), it would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I ended up having to write a custom Python script which you can find here. Here's the important part.

#Load the raw file
f = open(filename,'rb') # switch to command line args later
#Because the byte order is weird
a = f.read(1)
b = f.read(1)
#First line is rows
rows = int((b+a).encode('hex'), 16)
a = f.read(1)
b = f.read(1)
#Second line is columns
cols = int((b+a).encode('hex'), 16)
#Last byte is encoding, but we're just going to ignore it
f.read(1)
#And everything else is 8 bit encoded, so let's load it into numpy and display it with matplotlib
bin_image = np.fromstring(f.read(), dtype=np.uint8)
#Change the shape of the array to the actual shape of the picture
bin_image.shape = (cols, rows)

fig = pylab.figure()
#Display the original image
fig.add_subplot(1,4,1)
pylab.imshow(bin_image, cmap=cm.gray)