Bit plane

This allowed certain classes of image manipulation to be performed using bitwise operations (especially by a blitter chip), and parallax scrolling effects.

Some motion estimation algorithms can be performed using bit planes (e.g. after the application of a filter to turn salient edge features into binary values).

[5] This can sometimes provide a good enough approximation for correlation operations with minimal computational cost.

Convolutions may be reduced to bit shift and popcount operations, or performed in dedicated hardware.

Open source tools such as Pamarith from Netpbm and Convert from ImageMagick can be used to generate bit-planes.

The 8 bit-planes of a gray-scale image (the one on left). There are eight because the original image uses eight bits per pixel.