Basics of Color Imaging

Yao Wang
Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY11201
http://eeweb.poly.edu/~yao
 Outline

• Color perception and specification

– Color as EM waves
– Human perception of color
– Trichromatic color mixing theory
• Different color representations
– Primary color (RGB, CMY)
– Luminance/chrominance
• Color image capture and display
– 3D to 2D projection
– Analog vs. digital camera
• Color quantization
– Uniform
– Adaptive
– Dithering

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 2

 Light is part of the EM wave

Color images with figure captions in this and following slides are from [Gonzalez02]

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 3

 Illuminating and Reflecting Light

• Illuminating sources:
– emit light (e.g. the sun, light bulb, TV monitors)
– perceived color depends on the emitted freq.
– follows additive rule: R+G+B=White
• Reflecting sources:
– reflect an incoming light (e.g. the color dye, matte surface,
cloth)
– perceived color depends on reflected freq (=emitted freq-
absorbed freq.)
– follows subtractive rule: R+G+B=Black

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 4

 Eye Anatomy

From http://www.stlukeseye.com/Anatomy.asp

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 5

 Eye vs. Camera

Camera components Eye components

Lens Lens, cornea
Shutter Iris, pupil
Film Retina
Cable to transfer images Optic nerve send the info to the brain

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 6

 Human Perception of Color

• Retina contains photo receptors

– Cones: day vision, can perceive color
tone
• Red, green, and blue cones
• Different cones have different frequency
responses
• Tri-receptor theory of color vision
[Young1802]
– Rods: night vision, perceive brightness From
only http://www.macula.org/anatomy
/retinaframe.html
• Color sensation is characterized by
– Luminance (brightness)
– Chrominance
• Hue (color tone)
• Saturation (color purity)

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 7

 Frequency Responses of Cones

Ci = ∫ C (λ )ai (λ )dλ , i = r , g , b, y

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 8

 Trichromatic Color Mixing

• Trichromatic color mixing theory

– Any color can be obtained by mixing three primary colors with
a right proportion
• Primary colors for illuminating sources:
– Red, Green, Blue (RGB)
– Color monitor works by exciting red, green, blue phosphors
using separate electronic guns
– follows additive rule: R+G+B=White
• Primary colors for reflecting sources (also known as
secondary colors):
– Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (CMY)
– Color printer works by using cyan, magenta, yellow and black
(CMYK) dyes
– follows subtractive rule: R+G+B=Black

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 9

 RGB vs CMY

Magenta = Red + Blue Magenta = White - Green

Cyan = Blue + Green Cyan = White - Red
Yellow = Green + Red Yellow = White - Blue
©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 10
 red

Green Blue
 Color Specification

• Specify three primary or secondary colors

– RGB
– CMY
• Specify the luminance and chrominance
– HSB or HSI (Hue, saturation, and brightness or intensity)
– YIQ (used in NTSC color TV)
– YCbCr (used in digital color TV)
• Amplitude specification:
– 8 bits for each color component, or 24 bits total for each pixel
– Total of 16 million colors
– A true RGB color display of size 1Kx1K requires a display
buffer memory size of 3 MB

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 12

 RGB Coordinate

G
R

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 13

 Color Conversion

Some important color coordinates (RGB, CMY, XYZ, YIQ, etc) can be
converted from each other using linear conversion

Ex: RGB <-> YIQ:

Ex: RGB <-> CMY:  C  255  R 

 M  = 255 − G 
     
 Y  255  B 

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 14

 Demo Using Photoshop

• Show the RGB, CMY, HS I models

– Using the “window>show color” tool (in “show color”, click on
right arrow button to choose different color sliders)
– Sample image: RGBadd, CMYsub
• Use the dropper tool, click on different part of the image, see the
color information in “show color”
• Select different color coordinates

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 15

 Image Capture

• For natural images we need a light source (λ: wavelength of the source) ? .
– E(x, y, z, λ): incident light on a point (x, y, z world coordinates of the point)
• Each point in the scene has a reflectivity function.
– r(x, y, z, λ): reflectivity function
• Light reflects from a point and the reflected light is captured by an imaging device.
– c(x, y, z, λ) = E(x, y, z, λ) × r(x, y, z, λ): reflected light.

Courtesy of Onur Guleryuz

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 16

 More on Image Capture

• Reflected light to camera

– Camera absorption function

ψ R ,G , B ( X, t ) = ∫ C ( X, t , λ )aR ,G , B (λ )dλ
• A color camera has three color filters
• a R,G,B reflects the frequency response of each color filter

– Projection from 3-D to 2-D

X→x
P

ψ R ,G , B (x, t ) = ψ R ,G , B ( X, t )

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 17

 Perspective Projection Model

X 3-D
point Z
Y

C
y
F Camera
x
center
X Y
x=F ,y=F
Z Z
x
y
x The image of an object is reversed from its
2-D
3-D position. The object appears smaller
Image image
when it is farther away.
plane

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 18

 Color Image Capture

• Need three color filters: absorbing the red, green, and

blue components separately
• Analog camera: a continuous image is projected onto
a film from the lens
• Digital camera:
– An CCD array captures the three color intensity at every pixel
– The color values for all the pixels are directly saved in a
memory card – In the no-compression mode
• A 2-Mega pixel image (1600x1200) takes 5.7 Mbytes
• A 3-Mega pixel image (2048x1536) takes 9.4 MBytes
– The image is compressed and then saved
• JPEG is the standard coding method used in digital cameras
• Typical compression ratio (with high quality): 10-15

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 19

 Color Image Display

Input Output
0
1
…
255

Red signal Red Red

LUT Gun

Green signal Green Green

LUT Gun

Blue signal Blue Blue

LUT Gun

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 20

 Color Image Display and Printing

• Display:
– Need three light sources projecting red, green, blue
components respectively at every pixel. This is realized by
exciting the phosphors behind the screen with electronic
beams with appropriate intensity. There are three types of
phosphors, one for each color.
– Analog display: electronic beams cover the entire screen by
raster scan
– Digital display: directly exiciting at all pixel locations
• Printing:
– Need three (or more) color dyes (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and
Black)
– Out of gamut color: replaced by the nearest color

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 21

 Color Gamut

Each color model has different color range (or gamut). RGB model has a larger gamut than CMY.
Therefore, some color that appears on a screen may not be printable and is replaced by the closest
color in the CMY gamut.

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 22

 Demo with Photoshop

• Using photoshop to show how to replace a out of

gamut color by its closest in-gamut color.
• Choose “window->show color”, choose the “CMYK
slider”
• While having “RGBadd” in display, use dropper to
click on “red”, “green” or “blue”, you will see a warning
about out of gamut color, and the suggested
replacement color
• Also open “gamut” image, click on out of gamut region

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 23

 Color Quantization

• Select a set of colors that are most frequently used in an image, save
them in a look-up table (also known as color map or color palette)
• Any color is quantized to one of the indexed colors
• Only needs to save the index as the image pixel value and in the display
buffer
• Typically: k=8, m=8 (selecting 256 out of 16 million colors)

Input index (k bits) Red color (m bits) Green color (m bits) Blue color (m bits)

Index 1 … … …

……. … … …

Index 2^k … … …

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 24

 Uniform vs. Adaptive Quantization

• Uniform (scalar quantization)

– Quantize each color component uniformly
• E.g. 24 bit-> 8 bit can be realized by using 3 bits (8 levels) for
red, 3 bits (8 levels) for green, 2 bits (4 levels) for blue
• Do not produce good result
• Adaptive (vector quantization)
– Treating each color (a 3-D vector) as one entity. Finds the N
colors (vectors) that appear most often in a given image, save
them in the color palette (codebook). Replace the color at
each pixel by the closest color in the codebook
– The codebook (I.e. color palette) varies from image to image -
> adaptive

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 25

 24 bits -> 8 bits

Uniform quantization
(3 bits for R,G, 2 bits for B)

Adaptive (non-uniform) quantization

(vector quantization)
 Web Colors: 216 Safe RGB Colors

These colors are those that can be rendered consistently by different computer systems. They are obtained
by quantizing the R,G,B component independently using uniform quanitization. Each component is
quantized to 6 possible values: 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, 255.

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 27

 Color Dithering

• Color quantization may cause contour effect when the number of colors
is not sufficient
• Dithering: randomly perturb the color values slightly to break up the
contour effect
– fixed pattern dithering
– diffusion dithering (the perturbed value of the next pixel depends on the
previous one)
– Developed originally for rendering gray scale image using black and white ink
only

Original
Dithered
value
value
(R,G, or B)

Dithering
value

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 28

 8 bit uniform
with diffusion dithering

8 bit uniform
without dithering
 Demo Using Photoshop

• Show quantization results with different methods using

“image->mode->index color”
• Use my test image “anna_color”

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 30

 Pseudo Color Display

• Why?
– Human eye is more sensitive to changes in the color hue than
in brightness.
• How?
– Use different colors (different in hue) to represent different
image features in a monochrome image.
– Intensity slicing: Display different gray levels as different
colors
• Can be useful to visualize medical / scientific / vegetation
imagery
• E.g. if one is interested in features with a certain intensity range
or several intensity ranges
– Frequency slicing: Decomposing an image into different
frequency components and represent them using different
colors.
©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 31
 Intensity Slicing

Color

C4

C3

C2

C1

f0 =0 f1 f2 f3 f4 Gray level

Pixels with gray-scale (intensity) value in the range of (f i-1 , fi) are rendered with color Ci

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 32

 Example

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 33

 Another Example

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 34

Pseudo Color Display of Multiple Images

• Display multi-sensor images as a single color image

– Multi-sensor images: e.g. multi-spectral images by satellite

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 35

 An Example

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 36

 Example

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 37

 What Should You Know

• Each color is an EM wave at a certain wavelength in the visible

light band
• How a human perceives color
– Three types of cones sensitive to red, green, and blue respectively
• How to generate different colors in display and in printing
– By mixing three primary colors
– RGB for display, CMY+K for printing
• How is a color image stored
– Consists of three separate component images: ex. R,G,B, YCbCr
• A camera or eye project a 3D scene to a 2D image
– Can be modeled by the perspective projection
• Color quantization
– True color vs. index color image
– Uniform scalar quantization, vector quantization, dithering
• Pesudo color display

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 38

 References

• Gonzalez and Woods, Digital image processing, 2nd edition, Prentice

Hall, 2002. Sec. 6.1,6.2,6.3. (copies provided)

©Yao Wang, 2006 EE3414: Color 39