Binary Image

A binary image is a digital image that has only two possible values for each pixel. Typically the two colors used for a binary image are black and white though any two colors can be used. The color used for the object(s) in the image is the foreground color while the rest of the image is the background color. In the document scanning industry this is often referred to as bi-tonal.

Binary images are also called bi-level or two-level. This means that each pixel is stored as a single bit (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 digital image processing as masks or as the result of certain operations such as segmentation, thresholding, 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.