Computer pseudo-color coding of gray image based on IHS space

Pseudo-color coding of gray image is a typical processing in the fields of medicine, engineering and military. This paper proposed a new-approach of pseudo-color coding of a gray image based on a perceptual color space, IHS space. Firstly, color information is generated from a gray image by mapping each of the gray level to a point in IHS space. The mapping method applied to the components I, H, and S is realized by trial and error which gets the optimum composition of the components, and also matches the geometry of the component's intersection with the RGB cube. Then, the three signals for RGB which drive the physical display device are obtained through the transformation from the IHS space to RGB. This approach has advantages of allowing the user to specify color information easily, providing more pleasing results, and getting higher color sensitivity of gray levels.