java create tensor from BufferedImage

I have finally managed to get a working solution for a project where I inference with a retrained tf2 image detection model on frames I pull from an OpenCV videocapture object. I’m happy to share all the routes that were not productive, but what did work was turning an OpenCV Mat into a tensor in code below.

The code I got to work was turning the Mat into a BufferedImage, then saving that to a JPEG onto the disk, reading the JPEG from the disk back into a tensor via the DecodeJpeg function. It works but is horrible.

How can I turn a BufferedImage into a Tensor(Uint8) directly without having to save and read a JPEG file for this problem?

SavedModelBundle model = SavedModelBundle.load(modelPath,"serve");
BufferedImage drawImg = BIfromMat(Mat aMat);
ImageIO.write(drawImg,"png",new File(svImgPath1));

try (Graph g = new Graph(); Session s = new Session(g)) {
	Ops tf = Ops.create(g);
	Constant<TString> fileName = tf.constant(svImgPath1);
	ReadFile readFile = tf.io.readFile(fileName);
	Session.Runner runner = s.runner();
	DecodeJpeg.Options options = DecodeJpeg.channels(3L);
	DecodeJpeg decodeImage = tf.image.decodeJpeg(readFile.contents(),options);
		//fetch image from file
		Shape imageShape = runner.fetch(decodeImage).run().get(0).shape();
		//reshape the tensor to 4D for input to model
		Reshape<TUint8> reshape = tf.reshape(decodeImage,
			tf.array(1,
				imageShape.asArray()[0],
				imageShape.asArray()[1],
				imageShape.asArray()[2]
			)
		);
					
		try (TUint8 reshapeTensor = (TUint8)s.runner().fetch(reshape).run().get(0)) {
			Map<String,Tensor> feedDict = new HashMap<>();
			//The given SavedModel SignatureDef input
			feedDict.put("input_tensor", reshapeTensor);
			//gets the detected objects
			Map<String, Tensor> outputTensorMap = model.function("serving_default").call(feedDict);

not much activity on this question, so let me post what i have managed to figure out on my own. This version does grayscale.

BufferedImage buffImg = … //provide a grayscale BufferedImage
int width = buffImg.getWidth();
int height = buffImg.getHeight();
Shape theShape = Shape.of(1,height,width,1);
ByteNdArray pixMatrix = NdArrays.ofBytes(theShape);
//set the content of NdArray with the byte[] of the BufferedImage
//could do a byte at a time with pixMatrix.setByte(bA[j*width+i],0,j,i,0);
TUint8 theTens = TUint8.tensorOf(pixMatrix);