The Application of Range Space Operations to Color Images

The knowledge gained from scientific observation, experiment, and simulation is linked to the ability to analyze, understand, and manage the generated results. These abilities are increasingly at odds with the current, and future, capabilities to generate enormous quantities of raw scientific and engineering data from instruments, sensors, and computers. Many researchers are currently engaged in activities that seek to create new and novel methods for analyzing, understanding, and managing these vast collections of data. In this work, we present some of our research in addressing a particular type of problem in this broad undertaking. Much the scientific data of interest is in the form of observed, measured, or computed multivariate or multi-component vector field data--with either as physical or color data values. We are currently researching methods and techniques for working with this type of vector data through the use of a novel analysis technique. Our basic approach is to work with the vector field data in its natural physical or color space. When the data is viewed as a functional mapping of a domain, usually an index space, to a range, the physical or color values, potentially interesting characteristics of the data present themselves. These characteristics are useful inmore » analyzing the vector fields based on quantities and qualities of the physical or color data values themselves. We will present the basic development of the idea of range space operations and detail the information we are interested in and some of the issues involved in its computation. The data we are first interested in, and discuss exclusively in this work, is color image data from scientific observations and simulations. Some of the operations on the range space representation that are of interest to this color image data are colormap construction, segmentation, color modeling, and compression. We will show some how some of the operations can be implemented in range space, what analysis capabilities they provide, and how they work on some example images. We will also discuss some of the future goals of the research along with what has been learned from this work.« less