polars-cv

ℹ️ Note: This is a largely AI developed project and still in its early stages. Use at your own discretion.

A Polars plugin for high-performance vision and array operations.

Features

• Modular Pipelines: Define image processing pipelines and apply them to DataFrame columns.
• Expression Arguments: Any parameter that doesn't fix the output shape takes a Polars expression — numeric values, individual list elements, and non-structural enums/flags — on both the pipeline and the geometry namespaces. A null in one of those columns raises by default, or nulls only the rows that depend on it with .on_null_param("null").
• Zero-Copy Performance: Efficient memory management with stride-aware operations.
• Multi-Domain: Seamlessly move between images, geometry (contours), and numeric results.

Installation

pip install polars-cv

Quick Start

import polars as pl
from polars_cv import Pipeline

# Define a pipeline and apply it to a column
pipe = Pipeline().source("image_bytes").resize(height=224, width=224).grayscale()

df = pl.DataFrame({"image": [img1_bytes, img2_bytes]})
result = df.with_columns(
    processed=pl.col("image").cv.pipe(pipe).sink("numpy")
)

Scaling to Large Datasets (Streaming)

The .cv.pipe(...) expression is a normal elementwise Polars plugin, so the parallelism comes from Polars' engine, not from inside the plugin. On a plain DataFrame.with_columns(...)/.select(...) call (eager), the whole column is processed on a single thread. For larger-than-a-handful image workloads, run through the lazy streaming engine instead — Polars splits the column into morsels and processes them across its worker pool, and can spill intermediate state to disk when memory is tight:

result = (
    df.lazy()
    .with_columns(processed=pl.col("image").cv.pipe(pipe).sink("blob"))
    .collect(engine="streaming")
)

This is the recommended path for anything beyond small/interactive use; the plugin's per-morsel graph is cached, so per-morsel overhead is just a hash lookup. (The detection-metrics APIs already collect with engine="streaming" internally.)

Source Behavior (Auto DType)

source() defaults to "auto", which infers the decode path from the input column's dtype: String → file_path, List/Array → list/array, and Binary → blob when it carries the VIEW protocol magic, image_bytes otherwise. Pass an explicit format to override it.

image_bytes and file_path sources decode image format and dtype at runtime:

• PNG/JPEG usually decode as u8
• 16-bit PNG decodes as u16
• TIFF may decode as u8, u16, f32, or f64

This means the pipeline dtype starts as auto for these sources unless you pin it with dtype=... or an operation that determines dtype (such as normalize, threshold, or cast).

# Runtime decode with automatic dtype
auto_pipe = Pipeline().source("image_bytes").resize(height=224, width=224)

# Pin expected dtype at source (runtime cast when needed)
typed_pipe = Pipeline().source("image_bytes", dtype="f32").resize(height=224, width=224)

When using sink("list") or sink("array"), dtype must be known at planning time. For image_bytes / file_path, choose one of:

• set dtype in source(...)
• add .cast("...")
• use a dtype-fixing operation before the sink

pipe = Pipeline().source("file_path", dtype="f32").resize(height=224, width=224)

result = df.with_columns(values=pl.col("path").cv.pipe(pipe).sink("list"))

Dynamic Pipelines

Use Polars expressions for per-row parameter values:

pipe = (
    Pipeline()
    .source("image_bytes")
    .resize(height=pl.col("target_h"), width=pl.col("target_w"))
    .crop(top=pl.col("crop_y"), left=pl.col("crop_x"), height=100, width=100)
)

df = pl.DataFrame({
    "image": [img1_bytes, img2_bytes],
    "target_h": [224, 256],
    "target_w": [224, 256],
    "crop_x": [10, 20],
    "crop_y": [5, 15],
})

result = df.with_columns(
    processed=pl.col("image").cv.pipe(pipe).sink("numpy")
)

A parameter column may contain nulls. By default that fails the query, naming the column and row; .on_null_param("null") yields null for the affected rows instead — only the outputs that actually depend on the parameter, leaving genuine decode and execution errors raising as before. For a fallback value, fill it in the expression: pl.col("target_h").fill_null(224).

Operations

• Image: resize, resize_scale, resize_to_height, resize_to_width, resize_max, resize_min, thumbnail, grayscale, blur, threshold, crop, rotate, pad, letterbox, flip_h, flip_v.
• Color: cvt_color, to_hsv, to_lab, to_bgr, to_ycbcr.
• Channels: channel_select, channel_swap.
• Intensity: adjust_contrast, adjust_gamma, adjust_brightness, invert.
• Convolution & Edge Detection: convolve2d, sobel, laplacian, sharpen, canny.
• Morphology: erode, dilate, morphology_open, morphology_close, morphology_gradient.
• Affine Transforms: warp_affine, shear, rotate_and_scale (with automatic pipeline fusion).
• Enhancement: equalize_histogram.
• Compute: normalize, scale, clamp, relu, cast.
• Layout: transpose, reshape.
• Geometry: extract_contours, rasterize, area, perimeter, centroid, bounding_box.
• Points: normalize, translate, scale, rotate, distance, manhattan_distance, distance_to_contour, signed_distance_to_contour, nearest_point_on_contour, angle_to, midpoint, interpolate, within_bbox.
• Bounding Boxes: pairwise_iou, match_detections (via .bbox namespace).
• Analysis: histogram, perceptual_hash, extract_shape, label_reduce.
• Reductions: reduce_sum, reduce_mean, reduce_std, reduce_max, reduce_min, reduce_argmax, reduce_argmin, reduce_percentile, reduce_popcount.
• Metadata: .cv.width(), .cv.height(), .cv.channels(), .cv.image_dtype().
• Byte access: .cv.read_bytes() — read a path column's bytes (local or cloud) without decoding.
• Display: show_images() for Jupyter notebook visualization.
• Detection Metrics: Precision-Recall, AP, mAP, FROC, LROC, F1, confusion matrix, bootstrap confidence intervals.

Detection Metrics

Evaluate object detectors with industry-standard metrics:

from polars_cv.metrics import PreMatchedAdapter, precision_recall_curve, average_precision

# Wrap pre-matched detection data
adapter = PreMatchedAdapter()
table = adapter.match(df, pred_col="confidence", gt_col="is_tp", image_id_col="slide_id")

# Compute metrics
pr = precision_recall_curve(table)
ap = average_precision(table)

print(f"AP: {ap:.3f}")
print(pr.summary_table())

Available matchers: ContourMatcher (heatmap/mask), BBoxMatcher (bounding boxes), PreMatchedAdapter (pre-computed TP/FP).

Available metrics: precision_recall_curve, average_precision, mean_average_precision, froc_curve, lroc_curve, confusion_at_threshold, precision_at_threshold, recall_at_threshold, f1_at_threshold.

For full details, see the Documentation