PixInsight uses natively its own, but
openly documented, file format to store images (and other objects), called XISF, and pronounced more or less like... a sneeze.
When experimenting with astronomical images processed with PixInsight on
scikit-learn or
Keras python libraries, I found myself converting them to TIFF or the old FITS or format and then using
scikit-image or
astropy to load them, because there is no native way in python to load XISF files.
So, even it isn't even a fully functional XISF decoder (as defined in XISF specifications), I developed a very crude, at least by now, native XISF library for python, available at
github. In the project page I summarized what's (hopefully) working by now and what's not supported (sorry I don't know even if I'll extend it anymore). Of course, you're welcome if you want to test and complete it.
17/06/2021 Update: now a simple XISF encoder is also implemented.
Downloads
XISF for python