Colour in image processing

Abstract

Colour imaging is now commonplace in industrial and scientific applications and in domestic and professional photography. The digital processing of colour images for analysis, enhancement, or colour measurement is also common. This paper introduces the nature of colour, its electronic representation, and the concepts of luminance and chrominance. The complexities of precision image acquisition and display are outlined and the paper then discusses the fundamental processing concepts of component-wise and vector filtering and shows that there are still new developments to be expected in the digital processing of colour images.