High-Speed Manipulation of the Color Chromaticity of Digital Images

This study presents a method for enhancing digital color chromaticity that greatly reduces processing time. In this method color image data are encoded into a greatly reduced subset of colors for convenient storage and display. This allows the processing to be logically performed on the lookup table rather than the pixel data values, resulting in chromaticity adjustments that can be viewed interactively. A color reassignment results in a classified or a color-enhanced image. After describing how the image is encoded, the authors detail the processes by which the enhancement of color chromaticity is applied to scenes of practical interest. A fractal curve, mapping the three dimensions of color space to one dimension, is used for the encoding. Applications for this method include color enhancement, extraction of scene-of-crime marks from complex color backgrounds, and classification of multispectral images.