Jetraw Core FPGA implementation

Jetraw Core is also implemented in VHDL for deployment to FPGAs. Information about the FPGA implementation is available on demand by contacting Dotphoton directly. This section of the documentation focuses on using the software implementation to decode compressed buffers produced by the FPGA implementation.

Compressed buffer format

It is important to save the compressed buffer generated by the FPGA implementation “as-is”, without adding any padding at the beginning or end of the file. Introducing padding will cause the decoding process to fail.

Compatibility with software tools and libraries

Currently, FPGA-generated compressed buffers are only compatible with the direct image buffer decoding function, jetraw_decode, provided by the C library. It is not possible to decode any FPGA-generated compressed buffers using the GUI, the CLI, or the TIFF-related functions.

Decoding FPGA compressed buffers

The following example code shows how to decode FPGA-encoded image buffers. The output of the jetraw_decode function is still a raw image buffer; additional logic is required to store the buffer into a more convenient container.

Note

You must know the image dimensions (width and height) before decoding, as these are required parameters for jetraw_decode().

// Copyright 2025 Dotphoton AG
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <filesystem>
#include <vector>

#include "jetraw/jetraw.h"
#include "jetraw/dp_status.h"

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    std::filesystem::path source_path("<path-to-encoded-buffer>");
    auto image_height = <decoded-height>;
    auto image_width = <decoded-width>;

    // Load compressed buffer from file
    std::ifstream source_stream(source_path, std::ios::binary);
    if (!source_stream) {
        std::cerr << "Failed to open compressed buffer file\n";
        return 1;
    }

    std::vector<char> source_buffer(std::filesystem::file_size(source_path));
    source_stream.read(source_buffer.data(), source_buffer.size());

    // Prepare destination buffer
    std::vector<uint16_t> destination_buffer(image_height * image_width);

    // Decode image
    auto status = jetraw_decode(
        source_buffer.data(),
        source_buffer.size(),
        destination_buffer.data(),
        image_height * image_width
    );

    // Check status
    if (status != dp_success) {
        std::cerr << "Decoding failed: "
                  << dp_status_description(status) << std::endl;
        return 1;
    }

    // destination_buffer now contains the decompressed image data
    // Additional logic needed to save it to a file format (e.g., TIFF)

    return 0;
}