Yesterday I posted that I was looking for a replacement for the term truecolor. (I won't repeat the explanation here; take a look at the original post.) Quite a few readers posted interesting and thoughtful ideas.
Gene commented and Rob sent me e-mail about the use of the term truecolor in remotely sensed imagery. I had been thinking about the term as defining a form of representation: each pixel is a vector of color-space component values. They pointed out to me that a "truecolor image" in remote sensing has a more specific meaning: it is a three-band image in which the bands contain data from the red, green, and blue portions of the visible spectrum (in that order).
That caused me to rethink things a little bit. If I'm concerned about the distinction between different kinds of representation, then I can talk about a color image as being multichannel or indexed. That leaves us able to use truecolor to refer a specific kind of multichannel color image. And that has the advantage of leaving our existing doc mostly alone.
What do you think?
It interests me that my posts about terminology questions always seem to draw a lot of comment. And I appreciate that each time I do it, you teach me good stuff.
One of my favorite terminology stories is when Prof. Ron Schafer showed his class a "Sniglet." (Sniglets, which are made-up words with plausible-sounding definitions, were popular in the 1980s.) Since we were a digital signal processing class, we especially appreciated the definition of the Sniglet point blimfark - the point at which the stagecoach wheels in the movie start to look like they're going backward (otherwise known as aliasing).
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Steve, I think true color is fine. It’s one of those terms (like “intensity” in the optics/readiometry/photometry field) where the usage is rather sloppy and varied. Intensity, and it’s related terms, actually have rather rigorous definitions but they’re tedious and difficult to remember, hence the sloppy laymans usage. There is kind of a layman’s usage for many terms, which is not that precise as scientists may like, but everybody kind of figures out what it means from the context. And I think most people know that in most contexts, true color refers to a 3 color band(channel) rgb image. When I see more bands (say with remote sensing) I call it multispectral (which I think most people know means MORE than just 3 but not tons more), or with some chemical imaging methods (which may have “full” spectrums of 30 up to hundreds of wavelength samples for each pixel) I call those hyperspectral images, or simply spectral image.
Mark—Thanks. I agree.