Binary image

A binary image is one that consists of pixels that can have one of exactly two colors, usually black and white. Binary images are also called bi-level or two-level, Pixelart made of two colours is often referred to as 1-Bit or 1bit. This means that each pixel is stored as a single bit—i.e., a 0 or 1. The names black-and-white, B&W, monochrome or monochromatic are often used for this concept, but may also designate any images that have only one sample per pixel, such as grayscale images. In Photoshop parlance, a binary image is the same as an image in "Bitmap" mode. Binary images often arise in as or , and dithering. Some input/output devices, such as laser printers, fax machines, and bilevel computer displays, can only handle bilevel images. A binary image can be stored in memory as a bitmap, a packed array of bits. A 640×480 image requires 37.5 KiB of storage. Because of the small size of the image files, fax machine and document management solutions usually use this format. Most binary images also compress well with simple run-length compression schemes. Binary images can be interpreted as subsets of the two-dimensional integer lattice Z2; the field of morphological image processing was largely inspired by this view. An entire class of operations on binary images operates on a 3×3 window of the image. This contains nine pixels, so 29 or 512 possible values. Considering only the central pixel, it is possible to define whether it remains set or unset, based on the surrounding pixels. Examples of such operations are thinning, dilating, finding branch points and endpoints, removing isolated pixels, shifting the image a pixel in any direction, and breaking H-connections. Conway's Game of Life is also an example of a 3×3 window operation. Another class of operations is based on the notion of filtering with a structuring element. The structuring element is binary image, usually small, which is passed over the target image, in a similar manner to a filter in gray scale image processing.