Color Processing

The concepts of color processing are beyond the scope of this book. However, it is

safe to say that most applications that need color have to perform some processing

to get from raw CCD data to the actual image. In a monochrome application,

all the information needed to manipulate or store the image is contained in the

raw data. A monochrome image is just a black-and-white image of the object. The

data from a color system has to have the three single-color data values combined

to get the monochrome information. For instance, a color CCD system that is

looking at something blue might produce a large value from the blue CCD, a

smaller value from the green CCD, and zero from the red CCD. To get a

monochrome (light/dark) representation, the data from the three CCDs has to

be averaged or summed. To get color information, the software has to calculate

the actual color of the target from the relative intensities of the three CCD

outputs. In short, a color system will produce three times as much data as an

equivalent monochrome system, but may require more than three times as much

processing capability.