|   |
 
This is a supporting article describing in more detail the colour depth reduction techniques
used in the vbAccelerator Image Processor.
Decreasing Colour Depth
There are two forms of colour depth reduction. In the first form, you are trying to reduce to a given number of colours
and therefore want to choose the optimum palette given the number of colours you can have. The second form you have
a given palette and want to create an image which most closely matches the original given only the colours in the palette.
This article covers the second method only. To achieve the first method, you use a technique called Octree Colour Quantisation.
To create an image using a fixed palette which resembles the original, you cannot simply match colours onto the new palette
using a closest match. You can see this particularly if your destination palette is black and white, i.e. two colours. Just matching
the closest colour often produces an all black or all white image, and certainly the detail is lost.
To reduce colour depth like this correctly, you need to somehow dither the output pixels so that different shades are still
represented even with the lower colour resolution. It turns out there is a very simple way of doing this, as described by Floyd and Stucci
involving error diffiusion.
Floyd-Stucci Method
This is performed as follows:
- Starting at the top left pixel, determine the closest matching colour in the palette.
- Determine the difference between this colour and the actual colour.
- Add this error amount to the surrounding pixels.
The exact error diffusion is probably not 100% critical, but these are the amounts of error added to each pixel in
the Floyd-Stucci method:
|
-
|
Current
|
7/16
|
|
3/16
|
5/16
|
1/16
|
In the Image Processing sample, colour reduction is implemented in the cImageProcessDIB class. An optimised black and white
method is supplied as well as a method which decreases to an arbitrary palette. An Internet Explorer 216 colour palette is
supplied as a sample, and it creates the same results as the images here on the vbAccelerator site (which were
colour reduced using Paint Shop Pro using the Error Diffusion-Reduce Colour Bleeding method). The only problem is of course
there is no way to save the resulting 256 colour image out as a GIF in VB! (Even if it was,
it would contravene the unpleasant GIF/LZW patent licensing agreements! Don't even think of
acquiring a GIF license - it is prohibitively expensive.)
If anyone has code to save a bitmap to PNG I would be very interested to hear. Unfortunately
JPG is not a suitable format for saving 256 colour images: JPG only works with
True Colour and Grey Scale images, and does not preserve colour fidelity, so what appears to be a flat area
of colour in fact can vary quite a bit depending on the JPG compression level chosen.
Gray Scaling Images
Reducing images to a gray scale is a common image processing task which is also very simple to implement. The simplest
method to do this is simply to take the green value and use apply the same value to Red and Blue pixels. This works well
because the eye responds to green light in RGB colours much more strongly that the Red and Blue values. Obviously completely
saturated Reds and Blues will not be represented this way. A more accurate conversion can be performed using the
ITU standard, which is:
    (222 * Red + 707 * Green + 71 * Blue) / 1000
 Back to top
 Back to Image Processing Using DIB Sections
 Back to Source Code Overview
|
  |
