Working with .PGM files?

Question

I need to do some number crunching in .PGM image files. I'll use MatLab for that.

Now some files (apparently "P2" type) are plain-text and everything is straightforward because they look like this

P2
256 256
255
203 197 197 186 181 181 182 170 165 161 167 171 169 175 163 154 146 
138 146 156 166 161 162 164 166 167 177 175 169 167 171 163 153 161 
159 159 145 183 181 148 149 151 149 143 175 172 162 156 168 159 159 
...

But some files (apparently "P5" type) are like this

P5
256 256
255
*all kinds of random symbols here*
...

Wikipedia here says that the difference is that the latter uses binary encoding. How should I deal with it? I doubt I can import binary data into MatLab...

Answer 1

Have you tired reading the images using imread?

I = imread( pngFilename );