PIXSTAT(1)

💅 PIXSTAT(1) — the BRL-CAD glow-up 💅

okay so bestie, welcome to pixstat from the BRL-CAD fam 🫶 this little icon reads your color pix image and spills ALL the tea about its pixel intensities. no gatekeeping here ✨

✨ NAME ✨

pixstat — list statistics related to a color pix image 🌈

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

pixstat [-v] [file.pix]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So pixstat reads the pix(5) format file you hand it — or just takes standard input if you don't give it a file at all, no pressure 💜 — and then reports a whole collection of statistics on the pixel intensities for each color plane (red, green, and blue). three channels, three sets of numbers, one very thorough little program 👑

The values it reports are, in order:

• the number of pixels — and the square root of that count, which equals the image dimension if the image is square 🧚 (cute math moment)
• the minimum and maximum values
• the mean
• the median — that's the value below which half the pixels fall
• the mode — the most frequently occurring value — plus the number of pixels at that value
• the variance, standard deviation, and skew ⭐

ngl the way it does this is kind of iconic: the statistics are derived from a 256-bin histogram of the input, so a single pass over the file suffices and the computation is performed on the per-bin lump sums rather than on individual samples 🔥 one pass, no re-reading, we love an efficient queen.

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -v — Verbose 💅 In addition to the summary statistics, it dumps the full histogram, one line per intensity value (0-255) giving the red, green, and blue bin counts. > heads up bestie: this flag must precede the optional input file name, no cap 🙈

💖 EXAMPLES 💖

Example 1. Summarize a rendered frame 🖼️

pixstat moss.pix

Prints the per-channel min, max, mode, median, mean, standard deviation, variance, and skew for the image — a quick way to confirm an image is not over- or under-exposed before further processing ✨ like a vibe check but for exposure, iykyk.

Example 2. Inspect the full value distribution from a render 🔍

rt -o - -s512 moss.g all.g | pixstat -v

Renders a 512x512 image of the moss.g model, pipes the raw pix(5) stream directly into pixstat, and emits both the summary statistics and the complete 256-line red/green/blue histogram for examining the value distribution 👑 pipe it straight in, no temp files, main character energy fr fr.

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🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

brlcad(1), pixhist(1), pixhist3d(1), bwstat(1), rt(1), pix(5)

go read those too, they're all part of the friend group 🫶

⭐ AUTHOR ⭐

BRL-CAD Team 💜

📜 COPYRIGHT 📜

This software is Copyright (c) 1989-2026 by the United States Government as represented by U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

💀 BUG REPORTS 💀

Reports of bugs or problems should be submitted via electronic mail to devs@brlcad.org 📧 don't suffer in silence bestie, tell them everything.

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and that's the whole page 🎀 brought to you by BRL-CAD — PIXSTAT(1) — go forth and stat your pixels, ily 💖✨🦋