Conversion of a Color Image to a Grayscale Image

What is a Color Image?

   It is possible to construct (almost) all visible colors by combining the three primary colors red, green and blue, because the human eye has only three different color receptors, each of them sensible to one of the three colors. Different combinations in the stimulation of the receptors enable the human eye to distinguish approximately 350000 colors. A RGB color image is a multi-spectral image with one band for each color red, green and blue, thus producing a weighted combination of the three primary colors for each pixel.

   A full 24-bit color image contains one 8-bit value for each color, thus being able to display 16777216 different colors. However, it is computationally expensive and often not necessary to use the full 24-bit image to store the color for each pixel. Therefore, the color for each pixel is often encoded in a single byte, resulting in an 8-bit color image. The process of reducing the color representation from 24-bits to 8-bits, known as color quantization, restricts the number of possible colors to 256. However, there is normally no visible difference between a 24-color image and the same image displayed with 8 bits. An 8-bit color images are based on colormaps, which are look-up tables taking the 8-bit pixel value as index and providing an output value for each color.

What is a GrayScale Image?

A grayscale (or graylevel) image is simply one in which the only colors are shades of gray. The reason for differentiating such images from any other sort of color image is that less information needs to be provided for each pixel. In fact a `gray' color is one in which the red, green and blue components all have equal intensity in RGB space, and so it is only necessary to specify a single intensity value for each pixel, as opposed to the three intensities needed to specify each pixel in a full color image.

Often, the grayscale intensity is stored as an 8-bit integer giving 256 possible different shades of gray from black to white. If the levels are evenly spaced then the difference between successive graylevels is significantly better than the graylevel resolving power of the human eye.

Grayscale images are very common, in part because much of today's display and image capture hardware can only support 8-bit images. In addition, grayscale images are entirely sufficient for many tasks and so there is no need to use more complicated and harder-to-process color images.

What is meant by the Term RGB(RGB)?

It is a useful fact that the huge variety of colors that can be perceived by humans can all be produced simply by adding together appropriate amounts of red, blue and green colors. These colors are known as the primary colors. Thus in most image processing applications, colors are represented by specifying separate intensity values for red, green and blue components. This representation is commonly referred to as RGB.

The primary color phenomenon results from the fact that humans have three different sorts of color receptors in their retinas which are each most sensitive to different visible light wavelengths.

The primary colors used in painting (red, yellow and blue) are different. When paints are mixed, the `addition' of a new color paint actually subtracts wavelengths from the reflected visible light.

C# Sample Program:

Guidelines for Use

To illustrate Conversion of Color Image to Grayscale image, we start with a simple image containing some distinct artificial objects (specifically text). This program takes input of an image and then converts it to a gray scale image and renders it.

Now we apply Grayscale conversion to the image to convert it to Grayscale image.

Attachments:

    Project Files: GrayScale_App.zip