[gdal-dev] Support for Float16 and CFloat16

[Even Rouault]

Piyush,

>     I tried to search the gdal-dev archives but could not find much on this
> topic.
 
> HDF5 files support half precision floats and so does numpy. I was wondering
> if there were any plans to include support for this data type?

There's no native support for Float16 in C++, so your best option is to 
promote to Float32 (or CFloat32) when reading for a format where there are 
stored as half floats. This is for example what is done in the GTiff driver ( 
HalfToFloat() function in frmts/gtiff/tif_float.c )

You could add a NBITS=16 metadata item in the IMAGE_STRUCTURE metadata domain 
of the band(s) to reflect the original precision.

Even

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