Area properties of television pictures

Area size distributions are measured for four different still pictures formed of elements linearly quantized to eight amplitude levels ( bits). The initial results of this continuing measurement program indicate that for the measured pictures: 1) First-order brightness distributions tend to be uniform. 2) The largest number of areas occur for the intermediate grey levels, with considerably fewer areas encountered at either black or white. 3) The average size of black or white areas is larger than for the intermediate greys. 4) Black and white areas appear to be more simply connected than intermediate grey areas. 5) The frequency of occurrence of areas of size -elements falls off with a little slower than . 6) The area size distributions for each picture appear quite similar; the greatest difference between them is in the area size range elements, and in the presence or absence of one or two very large areas. 7) Areas of size smaller than elements constitute up to percent of the total number of areas and cover from five to ten percent of the total picture. These areas probably are of doubtful visual significance in the sense that their brightness values could be highly distorted without materially degrading the subjective appearance of the picture.