need fast image processing technique

I am developing a jave desktop application in a netbeans 6.9.1 mac OS X Intel environment. I need to process 1000 or more images at a time from local files with a pixel size of 1080 x 1080 or more. Typically in tiff format. My app is working fine however it is too slow. It is taking approximately 3 to 4 minutes to extract one row of pixels from each of about 1080 tiff images that are 1920x1080 pixels. I have no experience with jai but was told that is the way to go. My algorithm is basically getting the image from the file using JAI.create and then iterating through a loop height (1080) times extracting one pixel at a time using the getRGB method.

I will post the code if that will help but what I'm really looking for is advice from an image processing guru on the fastest algorithm to do the job. I have considered parsing the file manually but that requires knowledge of the various image formats which opens up another can of worms.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Any takers?