Scaling From Image Pixel Values to Displayed Colors in SAOimage

The Color Map

The workstation display only associates colors with a small, finite set of values (typically integer values between 0 and 255). The values used by the workstations are associated to the colors in its palette through a color map (e.g. 0=black, 1=dark blue, ...). Some of the color map entries are reserved for such things as the colors of the screen or window background, the mouse cursor, and terminal window text, leaving fewer color map values for an application like SAOimage to use. See the color chapter for a more detailed discussion.

The Image Data

Image data may have an arbitrary range of data values. Data values may be very large or be very small or negative values, and they may have fractional components. Image scaling involves binning groups of image data values for each display color map value.

Basic Scaling

Take the case of an image with a range of values from 0 to +1199 (a range of 1200). Imagine that SAOimage has only 200 color map values to work with. It might assign one color map slot (or bin) to each range of six in the image. Thus values 0 to 5 would be assigned the lowest color map slot, say 0. 6 to 11 would be assigned to 1, and so on up to the values between 1195 and 1199 going to slot 199 in the color map. Then, if slot 0 was black, all pixels in the image with data values between 0 and 5 would appear black in the display. If color map slot 131 was assigned the color pink, then image pixels whose data value was between 787 and 792 would appear pink in the display.

Scaling Distributions

The above example is an example of linear scaling. But suppose that it was important to be able to see the differences among levels 2, 3, 4, and 5, but not so important to see a difference between 1001 and 1002. Perhaps it would be sufficient to see differences between 1001 and 1100, but 1001, 1002, 1003, etc. could all have the same color. Then it would be better to use a scaling that used more color map slots for the lower image values than the higher image values. Log and square root scaling do that. To understand how that works, imagine a graph with image values along the side and color map values along the bottom. A plot of linear scaling would be a straight line. A log line would be curved, having less slope at the bottom (more color map values per image value range) and get steeper toward the top. The square root function would be similar but follow a different curve.

Non-linear Distributions

Suppose that weighting toward one end or the other wasn't good enough. Perhaps the data values fall in clusters with big gaps in between. Imagine an image with most of its data clustered between 0 and 200, but two or three pixels with a value of 1000. In the linear scaling 80% of the color cells would be used for non-existent values between 200 and 1000. Worse, as is common with CCD images, perhaps there are bad pixels with values like -1200, which have nothing to do with the data.

Equalization

It is appropriate to speak in terms of a histogram of the data values, plotting ranges of data values by the frequency (number of pixels) of their occurrence in the image. Suppose that the ranges in the histogram were selected such that each range was associated with one color map value. In a poor scaling distribution, many of the ranges have few or no actual occurrences in the image. Histogram equalization is a process whereby each range is adjusted with respect to the others, until each range has about the same number of pixel occurrences in the image, thus maximizing the information in the display. This usually produces a dramatic improvement in the amount of visible detail in the display.

The drawback of histogram equalization is that the ranges can vary greatly in size, thus a difference between two adjacent color map values may represent a big or a small difference in data values, with much irregularity from one step to the next.

Windowing the Scaling

Where most of the data falls within a single contiguous range, with bad pixels or infrequent events in the extremes to either end, scaling to the color map can be restricted to a specific range, with all values below that range having the same color as the minimum and all values above that range having the same color as the maximum. This can either be accomplished by specifying the limits directly, or by looking for a section of the image which is free from extreme values, and basing the scaling on the values in that section only.

Stretching the Color Map Range

Another trick to show more detail with a limited color map is to reuse it. By wrapping the color map on itself, it could represent the range of values from 0 to 99, and then start over, 100 having the same color as 0 and 199 having the same color as 99. This works for smoothly varying data and even has a sort of contoured look to it. Where the data fluctuations are greater than the base range, the result is a lot of meaningless noise. Realization and efficiency within SAOimage In order to realize reasonable execution times for rescaling the image display, SAOimage does not apply its scaling functions to real data. Where the image data was real, double, or long, the data is linearly rescaled to integer values between -32768 and 32767 (a range of 65,536). Each scaling function produces a look-up table (or map) for this range of values which is used to draw or redraw the display. If the data has such great extremes that this range linearly applied to the data's range will be insufficient, windowing limits for the initial linear scaling can be given on the command line (-rmin, -rmax).

The scaling function is further windowed by being applied only to the range of image values actually being displayed at the time the function is invoked. Pixels not appearing in the display window are not considered in the scaling algorithm. Thus scaling after panning and zooming will produce different scale look-up table mappings, depending on the contents of the display. Panning and zooming can be used in this way to find a better scaling. To allow for extreme data that just appear at the edges (common in CCD images) data within 2 pixels of the edge of the display are not considered in the assessment of range. In verbose mode, the scaling routine reports the range of values which it finds in the display.

One or both limits of the value range for scaling can be restricted by using the -min and -max arguments on the command line. When given, the low end of the range will not extend below the -min value, and/or the upper end will not extend above the -max value. The limit value should be given in terms of original file values (not the internal short-integer values, should they differ). The -min and/or -max value can be cleared by giving the -min or -max switch with no argument.

Panning or zooming after a scale map has been made does not cause a new scaling map to be calculated. The display is drawn with the existing scaling map. If the new display has values outside the range when the map was made, these values are usually clipped.