Werner Randelshofer’s Blog

I bought myself a Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W1 camera for christmas.

This camera shoots stereo pictures and stores them in a Multi-Picture (MPO) file.

Fuji did  a very fine job by standardizing and publishing the details of this format with the Japanese Camera & Imaging Products association (CIPA).

MPO files created by my camera consist of two concatenated JFIF streams. The meta-data is stored in TIFF Image File Directories (IFD) within APP1- and APP2-segments of the JFIF data streams.

The meta-data consists of Exif data sets and Multi-Picture Format (MPF) data sets.   Exif provides information about the camera settings and the picture taking conditions. The MPF data set is crucial for interpreting the contents of the MPO file. It tells as how the images in the file are related to each other.

The picture below shows how I worked my way through the file format. In the window at the top you can see a stereo picture I shot with the camera. The second window shows a binary representation of the Exif data. The Exif IFD is marked in yellow and green. The window below shows the parsed structures of the IFD. The fourth window shows the parsed information from the MPF data set. The MPTypeCode states that I shot a Multi-Frame Disparity Image, which is – well – the technical term for a stereo image.

I have integrated the code into MultiShow. If you have MPO files of your own, you can use it to inspect their meta-data.

Now, what is left to do, is shooting more pictures, and trying to make something useful with all this data…