Color to gray and back: color embedding into textured gray images.

Abstract

We have developed a reversible method to convert color graphics and pictures to gray images. The method is based on mapping colors to low-visibility high-frequency textures that are applied onto the gray image. After receiving a monochrome textured image, the decoder can identify the textures and recover the color information. More specifically, the image is textured by carrying a subband (wavelet) transform and replacing bandpass subbands by the chrominance signals. The low-pass subband is the same as that of the luminance signal. The decoder performs a wavelet transform on the received gray image and recovers the chrominance channels. The intent is to print color images with black and white printers and to be able to recover the color information afterwards. Registration problems are discussed and examples are presented.