ABSTRACT
Bitmap (BMP) is a common image file format of image processing under Windows environment. The standard introduces two gray-scale image compression methods. Analysis and experimental results demonstrate that, in comparison with other common ZIP and PNG lossless compression methods, the BMP method is simple, and can significantly improve the compression ratio for the nearly same processing time. BMP is limitedly used for the gray-scale image and the commonly used method is Run Length Encoding, which also has its own limitations. BMP never provides any compression method for the true color image to save the storage space. BMP is one of commonly used image file formats on Windows operating system. BMP stores the pixel data by starting from the lower left corner, and row by row from below to above. Each pixel in the BMP true color image is made up of red, green and blue components and each component need a byte to present its color information.
