Information about Bitmap

In computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to the similar concept of a spatially mapped array of pixels. Raster images in general may be referred to as bitmaps or pixmaps, whether synthetic or photographic, in files or in memory.

In some contexts, the term bitmap implies one bit per pixel, while pixmap is used for images with multiple bits per pixel.^[1][2]

Many graphical user interfaces use bitmaps in their built-in graphics subsystems;^[3] for example, the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 platforms' GDI subsystem, where the specific format used is the Windows and OS/2 bitmap file format, usually named with the file extension of .BMP (or .DIB for device-independent bitmap). Besides BMP, other file formats that store literal bitmaps include InterLeaved Bitmap (ILBM), Portable Bitmap (PBM), X Bitmap (XBM), and Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap (WBMP). Most other image file formats, such as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and GIF, to name just a few, store bitmap images (as opposed to vector images), but they are not usually referred to as bitmaps, since they use compressed formats internally.

Pixel storage

In typical uncompressed bitmaps, image pixels are generally stored with a color depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, or 64 bits per pixel. Pixels of 8 bits and fewer can represent either grayscale or indexed color. An alpha channel (for transparency) may be stored in a separate bitmap, where it is similar to a greyscale bitmap, or in a fourth channel that, for example, converts 24-bit images to 32 bits per pixel.

The bits representing the bitmap pixels may be packed or unpacked (spaced out to byte or word boundaries), depending on the format or device requirements. Depending on the color depth, a pixel in the picture will occupy at least n/8 bytes (n is the bit depth, since 1 byte equals 8 bits).

For an uncompressed, packed within rows, bitmap, such as is stored in Microsoft DIB or BMP file format, or in uncompressed TIFF format, the approximate size for a n-bit-per-pixel (2ⁿ colors) bitmap, in bytes, can be calculated as:

, where height and width are given in pixels.

In the formula above, header size and color palette size, if any, are not included. Due to effects of row padding to align each row start to a storage unit boundary such as a word, additional bytes may be needed.

Device-independent bitmaps and BMP file format

Main article: BMP file format

Microsoft has defined a particular representation of color bitmaps of different color depths, as an aid to exchanging bitmaps between devices and applications with a variety of internal representations. They called these device-independent bitmaps or DIBs, and the file format for them is called DIB file format or BMP file format. According to Microsoft support:^[4]

A device-independent bitmap (DIB) is a format used to define device-independent bitmaps in various color resolutions. The main purpose of DIBs is to allow bitmaps to be moved from one device to another (hence, the device-independent part of the name). A DIB is an external format, in contrast to a device-dependent bitmap, which appears in the system as a bitmap object (created by an application...). A DIB is normally transported in metafiles (usually using the StretchDIBits() function), BMP files, and the Clipboard (CF_DIB data format).

Here, "device independent" refers to the format, or storage arrangement, and should not be confused with device-independent color.

Other bitmap file formats

Main article: Image file formats

The X Window System uses a similar XBM format for black-and-white images, and XPM (pixelmap) for color images. Numerous other uncompressed bitmap file formats are in use, though most not widely.^[5] Much more common are the standardized compressed bitmap files such as GIF, PNG, TIFF, and JPEG.^[6] TIFF and JPEG have various options. JPEG is usually lossy compression. TIFF is usually either uncompressed, or losslessly Lempel-Ziv-Welch compressed like GIF. PNG uses deflate lossless compression, another Lempel-Ziv variant.

There are also a variety of "raw" image files, which store raw bitmaps with no other information; such raw files are just bitmaps in files, often with no header or size information, and should not be confused with photographic raw image formats, which store raw unprocessed sensor data in a structured container such as TIFF format along with extensive image metadata.

See also

• Raster graphics
• Raster scan

References

•  • [ e] Multimedia compression formats
Video compression formats	ISO/IEC MJPEG MPEG-1 MPEG-2 MPEG-4 ASP MPEG-4/AVC ITU-T H.261 H.262 H.263 H.264 Others AVS Bink Dirac Indeo MJPEG RealVideo Theora VC-1 VP6 VP7 WMV
Audio compression formats	ISO/IEC MPEG-1 Layer III (MP3) MPEG-1 Layer II MPEG-1 Layer I AAC HE-AAC HE-AAC v2 aacPlus v2 ITU-T G.711 G.722 G.722.1 G.722.2 G.723 G.723.1 G.726 G.728 G.729 G.729.1 G.729a Others AC3 Apple Lossless ATRAC FLAC iLBC Monkey's Audio μ-law Musepack Nellymoser OptimFROG RealAudio SHN Speex Vorbis WavPack WMA TAK
Image compression formats	ISO/IEC/ITU-T JPEG JPEG 2000 lossless JPEG JBIG JBIG2 PNG WBMP Others BMP GIF ILBM PCX PGF TGA TIFF HD Photo
Media container formats	General 3GP ASF AVI DMF DPX FLV Matroska MP4 MXF NUT Ogg Ogg Media QuickTime RealMedia VOB Audio only AIFF AU WAV
See for methods and for codecs