problem including images in safe_mode

Hall all, i have sometimes problems to include images. the reason are substrings like <? in the image. in that case the php-parser tries to parse the string and returns the error: parse error, unexpected ',' in unforunatly there in no other way to include the image, cause the server runs in safe_mode and the image is located in the safe_mode_include_dir. therefore readfile and things like that wont work. Any suggestions how to protect an including file for getting parsed? Thanks in advance.