Image Processing

[g-unit]

Hey,
I have been programming for around 3 years now but have never touched upon image processing in java. Im trying to read in an image and save each pixel value to an array. I have tried many methods like PixelGrabber from the java.image library i believe and none seem to work for me. Is there a simple way of taking and image and saving every pixel value into and array. p.s the image is quite big so the array will get very large.

Thanks for your time, hope you can help.
Steve.

[ArchAngel]

public static byte[] getBytes(Object obj) throws java.io.IOException{
   ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
   ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(bos);
   oos.writeObject(obj);
   oos.flush();
   oos.close();
   bos.close();
   byte [] data = bos.toByteArray();
   return data;
}