Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3 Bitmapped
and Vector Graphics
The UCL academy
Computing department
KEYWORDS
Pixel
Bitmap
Resolution
Colour depth
Bytes-Kilobytes-Megabytes
Vector graphics
Data compression
The Topic for Presentation ......
• The meaning of bitmap
• The meaning of resolution
• The meaning of colour depth
• How to calculate the size of a bitmap in
bytes, kilobytes and megabytes
• The meaning of vector graphic
• Advantages and disadvantages of
bitmapped and vector graphics
• The meaning of data compression
• Basic image compression techniques
• Summary
5.3.1 Bitmapped Graphics
In bitmapped graphics, an image is divided into
a grid of picture elements called pixels (a pixel
is the smallest addressable area or smallest
solid block of colour in an image).
The colour in each grid cell is sampled and
then assigned a binary code to represent the
average colour in that cell which is then stored
in a particular position in memory. A bitmap is
created when the pixels of an image are
mapped to positions in memory that store
binary codes representing the colour of each
pixel.
5.3.1 Bitmapped Graphics
A Bitmapped Graphic is a mapping of pixels in
an image to positions in memory that store
binary codes representing the colour of each
pixel.
In bitmapped graphics, a image is divided into a
grid of picture elements called pixels. Picture 2
shows how Picture 1 may look when turned into
pixels.
Picture 1 Picture 2
5.3.2 Resolution of a VDU Screen
A pixel is the smallest addressable area or
smallest solid block of colour in an image.
1. Run-length encoding
2. Lossy compression
5.3.10 Data Compression
1. Run-length encoding (RLE)
RLE is a lossless compression technique which
takes into account that some images have long
runs of pixels that are the same colour. If three
or more consecutive cells are found to have
the same colour then that run of cells can be
encoded in two bytes. The first byte stores the
number of identical consecutive (contiguous)
memory cell bytes and the second byte stores
the colour code. Decompressing an RLE-
compressed image produces the original
uncompressed image exactly without loss.
Examples: GIF, JPEG and PNG.
5.3.10 Data Compression
2. Lossy compression
Lossy compression discards information which is
not considered important e.g. background
scenery is saved with reduced resolution.
Decompressing results in an uncompressed
image that is different from the original
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