Deep recursion / stackoverflow with tiff image

Hello.

Tiff image can be downloaded here: https://github.com/cgohlke/imagecodecs/blob/master/tests/tiff/gray.movie.u2.tif

Then try to extract metadata by using this code:

InputStream inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(imageBlob);

Metadata metadata = ImageMetadataReader.readMetadata(inputStream);

Directory mimeTypeDir = metadata.getFirstDirectoryOfType(FileTypeDirectory.class);

String mimeType = mimeTypeDir.getString(3);
String extension = mimeTypeDir.getString(4);

This should throw a java.lang.StackOverflowError

I also tried using a a tool like ExifTool and it threw a similar warning: Deep recursion on subroutine "Image::ExifTool::ProcessDirectory" Deep recursion on subroutine "Image::ExifTool::Exif::ProcessExif"

Let me know if you need more details.

[kaiwinter]

Those tags are all in different IFDs. Please ignore my previous comment as I wasn’t aware of the exact TIFF structure but now I read some of the specification. I used a different tool to examine the structure of that tiff. It contains 65568 IFDs which is just too much for the default stack size. As the processing works in a recursive way this is just some kind of limitation.

@eriken You can work around this StackOverflowError by setting a bigger stack size for the VM e.g. -Xss1g. With that size I’m able to parse the TIFF using metadata-extractor.

[cgohlke]

Not sure this is helpful: the file gray.movie.u2.tif contains more than 2^16 IFDs. Such files are not uncommon in bio-imaging. Some libraries (e.g. libtiff) can not access all IFDs because they use an uint16 counter.