I'm not getting any traction with this on the PerlMagick board, so let me start fresh here with an extra nudge. Namely, that the array produced by the Statistics() method is unfriendly and likely to cause trouble down the road. It just gives a list of numbers; you're on your own figuring out which number is mean or kurtosis for a red or black channel or whatever, based on the colorspace, presumably. Now that IM7 is hoping to deal with more or less arbitrary channels, something better than a list of numbers would be very good. I see that the MagickWand and the MagickCore API have something better, though I don't know if it handles anything beyond means and the usual rgb-like channels. Something along those lines would be most helpful in the PerlMagick method. It could be managed, I'm guessing, without breaking the current usage.
Rick