The

Concept of
Channels in
an Image
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There are a handful of colour spaces to represent an
image such as RGB, BGR, HSV, CMYK etc. But there is
something they all have in common. They are the
channels, which these colour spaces use, to
collectively form an image. Let us look at some
definitions of channels. Wikipedia says that,

Color digital images are made of pixels, and pixels are

made of combinations of primary colors represented by
a series of code. A channel in this context is the
grayscale image of the same size as a color image, made
of just one of these primary colors.

If this sounds confusing, hear me out. This definition

says that, every image is made up of pixels and each
pixel is made up of combinations of colours, to be
more precise, primary colours. A channel is the
grayscale image of a coloured image, which is made
up of only one of the primary colours that form the
coloured image. If this still doesn’t make any sense,
please stick around here for a couple of minutes.

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 Grayscale

Grayscale images are single-channeled

images in which each pixel carries only
information about the intensity of light.
These images are exclusively made up of
shades of gray.

Grayscale images should not be confused with black and white images (binary
images) which contain only black and white pixels. In binary images, either a pixel
is black or it is white. They have no colours in between. But Greyscale images have
a wide range of shades of grey in their pixels.
Now let us see what we get when we print a grayscale image array. For that we use
the code below:
import cv2 as cv #read the image
image = cv.imread("architecture.jpg") #convert the image to grayscale
gray = cv.cvtColor(image, cv.COLOR_BGR2GRAY) #print the image array
print(gray)
print("")#print the shape of the array which is of the form (height, width, number of
channels)
print(gray.shape)
The output is:

As you can see, the printed array is a two dimensional array, in which each
number represents a pixel and the value of the number is the intensity of light in
that pixel. As each number in the above image array represents a pixel, it is called
a single channeled image. The light intensity of each pixel in computer vision is
measured from 0 to 255 and is known as the pixel value. When the pixel value is 0
it is black and when the pixel value is 255 it is white. Since we used OpenCV to
read the image array, the dimensions of the above array are of the form height x
width. Here the image has 6016 pixels along it’s y-axis(height) and 4016 pixels
along its x-axis(width).

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 RGB images

Unlike grayscale images, RGB images are

three channeled. Each pixel is made up of
three channels, with each channel
representing a colour.

Now, let us print an RGB image and observe the results. We use the below code
for that:

import cv2 as cv#read the image

image = cv.imread("architecture.jpg")#convert the image to RGB (images are read in
BGR in OpenCV)
RGB = cv.cvtColor(image, cv.COLOR_BGR2RGB)#print the image array
print(RGB)
print("")#print the shape of the image array
print(RGB.shape)

The output is:

The output is a three dimensional array this time! In this image each pixel has
three channels. Each array in the second dimension, represents a pixel. The 0th
index has the intensity of red light, the 1st index the intensity of green light and
the 2nd index, the intensity of blue light.
When you print the shape of this image, it prints a tuple containing the height,
width and the number of channels. When you multiply these three values you get
the total number of values inside the image array.

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 Visualization of each channel
separately

Now as we know what a channel is, let us

see how each channel looks like
separately.

Observe the image above

Now let us split the channels of the above image using the following code:

import cv2 as cv
import numpy as np#read the image
image = cv.imread("colours.jpg")#convert the image to RGB (images are read in BGR in
OpenCV)
image = cv.cvtColor(image, cv.COLOR_BGR2RGB)#split the image into its three channels
(R,G,B) = cv.split(image)#create named windows for each of the images we are going to
display
cv.namedWindow("Blue", cv.WINDOW_NORMAL)
cv.namedWindow("Green", cv.WINDOW_NORMAL)
cv.namedWindow("Red", cv.WINDOW_NORMAL)#display the images
cv.imshow("Blue",B)
cv.imshow("Green", G)
cv.imshow("Red", R)#write the images to disk
cv.imwrite("channel_red.jpg", R)
cv.imwrite("channel_green.jpg", G)
cv.imwrite("channel_blue.jpg", B)
if cv.waitKey(0):
cv.destroyAllWindows()

We use OpenCV’s split function to split the channels. The outputs of the code are:

Red Channel Green Channel Blue Channel

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I know that there are a couple of questions messing up
your thought process now. So let me explain.

Why are they in grayscale?

That’s because, as we split up the channels, the pixels
in each of these images have only one channel now. So
they are in greyscale.

How can I differentiate between these images?

Well, just compare each image with the original image.
Let us take the red channel image. You can see that
the regions containing red color in the original image
are lighter in the red channel image. This simply
means that, regions which contribute more to the red
colour of the original image are lighter in the grayscale
image of the red channel. And the regions which
contribute less or do not contribute are dark. This
applies for all the three channels.

Why is yellow color lighter in green and red

channels?
That’s because yellow is a mixture of red and green. So
green and red make significant contributions to yellow.
I hope this has explained all the questions you had
related to image channels.

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Ninad Madhab

Ninad Madhab