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Relative luminance calculation in a bitmap

Luminance is a measure of the light intensity per unit area of light travelling at a given direction. In the case when light travels towards the lens of a camera, we can measure and calculate the so called log-average (or relative) luminance by finding the geometric mean of the luminance values of all pixels. If we deal with black and white images the luminance value is the actual pixel value. In a color image however, the relative luminance is a value modulated by a weighted average of the values of the color filters.

An accurate enough empirical formula that describes the relative luminance of a pixel in three colorimetric spaces (XYZ) such as the RGB standard is: $$Y_{RGB} = 0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B$$ Color spaces such as the RGB (the case of an uncompressed bitmap) that use the ITU-R BT.709 primaries, the relative luminance can be calculated with enough precision from these linear RGB components. For the YUV color space, we can still calculate the relative luminance from RGB as: $$Y_{YUV} = 0.299 R + 0.587 G + 0.114 B$$

I am sharing a tiny C snippet that computes the relative luminance in a given bitmap image. It has two primary functions:

BITMAPINFOHEADER() — The bitmap pixel extraction algorithm reads the bitmap file image header, omits the meta/additional (compression) field and uses the header to calculate the exact address/location where the bitmap image data starts. Functions from the stdio library have been used for bitmap file input and fseek to extract the bitmap header information location.

ANALYZE() — The analyze function is reading the bitmap image data, with the help of a pointed out location from the previous BITMAPINFOHEADER() function and dumps the data into a one-dimensional char array.

MAIN() — main uses the created one-dimensional array from the analyze function to calculate the luminance for each pixel using the formula described earlier. A summation of the total luminance of all pixels is done and a calculation of the total number of pixels. These are then used for the final averaging function of the pre-computed weighted values: $Y_{avg}=Y_{tot}/N_{pix}$. A standard function from stdio (fprintf) is used for the final pixel log generation. The log file is in a *.csv style format with additional information of the color values of each pixel of the bitmap image. The end of the *.csv log file contains a value of the relative luminance value of the input image.

It should compile on pretty much any vanilla gcc.

Date:Sun Jul 3 11:40:29 CET 2016

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