I highly recommend you use the tobytes function of the Image object. After some timing checks this is much more efficient.
def jpg_image_to_array(image_path):
"""
Loads JPEG image into 3D Numpy array of shape
(width, height, channels)
"""
with Image.open(image_path) as image:
im_arr = np.fromstring(image.tobytes(), dtype=np.uint8)
im_arr = im_arr.reshape((image.size[1], image.size[0], 3))
return im_arr
The timings I ran on my laptop show
In [76]: %timeit np.fromstring(im.tobytes(), dtype=np.uint8)
1000 loops, best of 3: 230 µs per loop
In [77]: %timeit np.array(im.getdata(), dtype=np.uint8)
10 loops, best of 3: 114 ms per loop
```