Your humble servant begs the Learned Monks to cast a pearl or two in answer to the following:

My current project requires collecting a few standard statistical values about the pixels in an image. Typical values are the mean, average, mode, and variation of the population of pixels in a particular region of the image, such as the whole image, the border, the center region, and so on.

I have done most of the needed calculations by converting the image to a ".txt" format with ImageMagick and operating on the resulting text file. It seems likely there is a more efficient way to do this, but I have not been able to find (or, maybe, understand) a better already-invented method. Is there a Perl module that can handle an image as a complex array of integer values? Is there some better way of using ImageMagick for this? Also, is there a Perl module that can do standard statistical operations on a three-dimensional matrix?

Best regards