Pambayer User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pambayer User Manual(1)
NAME
pambayer - interpret Bayer patterns
SYNOPSIS
pambayer -type={1|2|3|4} [-nointerpolate] [pamfile]
Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable. You may use double
hyphens instead of single hyphen to denote options. You may use white
space in place of the equals sign to separate an option name from its
value.
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pambayer reads a Bayer pattern in a 1-deep Netpbm image and produces a
color image in PAM RGB format as output.
A Bayer pattern is what you get from the optical sensor in some digital
cameras. Such a camera doesn't have a red, green, and blue sensor in
the exact same place for an individual pixel. Instead, it has red,
green, and blue sensors laid out in a two dimensional array. The pat-
tern in which they are laid out is the Bayer pattern. The input to pam-
bayer is one sample value for each of those sensors, so some samples are
red, some are green, and some are blue.
pambayer turns that into a regular visual image with one pixel per sen-
sor. For the two components of each pixel that are missing in the cor-
responding Bayer input, pambayer averages the sample values from the ad-
jacent pixels that do have that component.
But you can have pambayer fill in black instead (see the -noninterpolate
option), which gives you a simpler representation of what the camera
saw, on which you might do further processing. Such an image still
looks right, though considerably dimmer, if you stand far enough away
and let your eyes do the interpolation.
The input image is a pseudo-PNM image (pseudo- because while the struc-
ture is the same, the sample values have different meanings) or PAM im-
age of arbitrary tuple type. pambayer looks at only the first plane of
the input.
The output image is a PAM image of tuple type "RGB", i.e. a standard
color image. You can convert this to PPM with pamtopnm(1).
If you're interested in just one of the primary colors, use pamchannel
on the output of pambayer to extract it.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), pambayer recognizes the
following command line options:
-type=n
This tells which Bayer pattern the input is:
1 GBG/RGR/GBG matrix
2 RGR/GBG/RGR matrix
3 BGB/GRG/BGB matrix
4 GRG/BGB/GRG matrix
This option is mandatory.
-nointerpolate
Each output pixel position corresponds to one position in the in-
put Bayer pattern, which means only one of the three color compo-
nents is supplied by the input. For the other two, this option
says to user zero. Without it, pambayer instead interpolates
from the adjacent pixels that do have that color component.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.49 (December 2009).
SEE ALSO
cameratopam(1) pam(1)
HISTORY
pambayer was new in Netpbm 10.30 (October 2005).
DOCUMENT SOURCE
This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML
source. The master documentation is at
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pambayer.html
netpbm documentation 18 August 2005 Pambayer User Manual(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Sat Oct 3 05:59:56 CEST 2026.