Portable Graymap (.pgm)
The Portable Graymap (PGM) file extension, originating in the late 1980s as part of the Netpbm project, stands for "Portable Gray Map". It serves as a simple, versatile format for grayscale images, enabling easy reading and writing by various programs. Due to its straightforward structure and plain text encoding, it's often used in academic and research settings where ease of parsing and accessibility are crucial. PGM files store grayscale images in a compact, efficient manner, making them an essential tool for image processing tasks.