GoHeif - A go gettable decoder/converter for HEIC based on libde265

Intel and ARM supported

Install

go get github.com/raducrisan1/goheif

• Code Sample

func main() {
	flag.Parse()
	...
  
	fin, fout := flag.Arg(0), flag.Arg(1)
	fi, err := os.Open(fin)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer fi.Close()

	exif, err := goheif.ExtractExif(fi)
	if err != nil {
		log.Printf("Warning: no EXIF from %s: %v\n", fin, err)
	}

	img, err := goheif.DecodeImage(fi)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Failed to parse %s: %v\n", fin, err)
	}

	fo, err := os.OpenFile(fout, os.O_RDWR|os.O_CREATE, 0644)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Failed to create output file %s: %v\n", fout, err)
	}
	defer fo.Close()

	w, _ := newWriterExif(fo, exif)
	err = jpeg.Encode(w, img, nil)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Failed to encode %s: %v\n", fout, err)
	}

	log.Printf("Convert %s to %s successfully\n", fin, fout)
}

What is done

• Changes make to @bradfitz's (https://github.com/bradfitz) golang heif parser

  • Some minor bugfixes
  • A few new box parsers, noteably 'iref' and 'hvcC'

• Include libde265's source code (SSE by default enabled) and a simple golang binding

• A Utility heic2jpg to illustrate the usage.

Security notes

This decoder parses untrusted-by-default container data and runs the bundled libde265 C++ decoder. The Go layer enforces hard limits to bound resource use and prevent integer-overflow / memory-aliasing classes of bugs:

• The total input stream is capped at 200 MiB (maxInputBytes).
• Grid output dimensions and tile counts are capped (maxGridDim, maxGridTiles); 32-bit grid dims are parsed via binary.BigEndian.Uint32 to avoid signed-shift behavior on 32-bit builds.
• libde265 pixel buffers are always copied via C.GoBytes before returning; no Go slice aliases C-owned memory.
• BMFF parser allocations are bounded per box body (maxBoxBodyBytes, maxHevcNalBytesPerBox, maxIrefCount, etc.). See heif/bmff/bmff.go.

For hardened deployments that parse attacker-controlled HEIC input, run the decoder in a sandboxed process. The library has no non-stdlib runtime dependencies; consumers needing full EXIF parsing should pass the bytes returned by ExtractExif to the EXIF library of their choice.

License

• heif and libde265 are in their own licenses

• goheif.go, libde265 golang binding and the heic2jpg utility are in MIT license

Credits

• heif parser by @bradfitz (https://github.com/go4org/go4/tree/master/media/heif)
• libde265 (https://github.com/strukturag/libde265)
• implementation learnt from libheif (https://github.com/strukturag/libheif)

TODO

• Upstream the changes to heif?