Serialize image

Hi guys, I have a problem where I need to covert a image to *something* where I can send it over a socket. Please don't ask me why, I am not in a position to change the architecture. Basically, I need to prepare the image to the stage just prior to utilising imagepng and then write it to a socket to eventually be flushed to the browser. I looked into serialize(); however, it will not allow resource types (such as an image) so I'm pretty much stuck at this point. The possibility does exist for me to do this via perl instead, but id prefer a php solution if possible. Thanks for any help you can give, I hope I have explained this well enough, Todd.