THE BMP FILE FORMAT
Compiled by Nathan Liesch of Imperium Accelero 9000
Increasingly the power of FPGAs is being utilized for DSP applications and a common source
for digital signals to process is images. The first step in implementing any sort of image
processing algorithm is accessing the raw pixel data.
The MS-Windows standard format is BMP and was developed as a device-independent bitmap
(DIB) format that will allow Windows to display the bitmap on any type of display device. The
term "device independent" means that the bitmap specifies pixel color in a form independent of
the method used by a display to represent color. This file format can be stored uncompressed,
so reading BMP files is fairly simple; most other graphics formats are compressed, and some,
like GIF, are difficult to decompress.
The file format consists of the following structures:
Corresponding
Structure Description
Bytes
contains information about the type, size, and layout of a
Header 0x00 - 0x0D
device-independent bitmap file
specifies the dimensions, compression type, and color format
InfoHeader 0x0E - 0x35
for the bitmap
contains as many elements as there are colors in the bitmap,
but is not present for bitmaps with 24 color bits because each
ColorTable 0x36 - variable
pixel is represented by 24-bit red-green-blue (RGB) values in
the actual bitmap data area
an array of bytes that defines the bitmap bits. These are the
actual image data, represented by consecutive rows, or "scan
lines," of the bitmap. Each scan line consists of consecutive
Pixel Data variable
bytes representing the pixels in the scan line, in left-to-right
order. The system maps pixels beginning with the bottom scan
line of the rectangular region and ending with the top scan line.
Below is a more detailed table of the contents of each of these structures.
Name Size Offset Description
Header 14 bytes Windows Structure: BITMAPFILEHEADER
Signature 2 bytes 0000h 'BM'
FileSize 4 bytes 0002h File size in bytes
reserved 4 bytes 0006h unused (=0)
Offset from beginning of file to the beginning
DataOffset 4 bytes 000Ah
of the bitmap data
InfoHeader 40 bytes Windows Structure: BITMAPINFOHEADER
Size 4 bytes 000Eh Size of InfoHeader =40
Width 4 bytes 0012h Horizontal width of bitmap in pixels
Height 4 bytes 0016h Vertical height of bitmap in pixels
Planes 2 bytes 001Ah Number of Planes (=1)
Bits Per Pixel 2 bytes 001Ch Bits per Pixel used to store palette entry
information. This also identifies in an indirect way
the number of possible colors. Possible values
are:
1 = monochrome palette. NumColors = 1
4 = 4bit palletized. NumColors = 16
8 = 8bit palletized. NumColors = 256
16 = 16bit RGB. NumColors = 65536
24 = 24bit RGB. NumColors = 16M
Compression 4 bytes 001Eh Type of Compression
0 = BI_RGB no compression
1 = BI_RLE8 8bit RLE encoding
2 = BI_RLE4 4bit RLE encoding
ImageSize 4 bytes 0022h (compressed) Size of Image
It is valid to set this =0 if Compression = 0
XpixelsPerM 4 bytes 0026h horizontal resolution: Pixels/meter
YpixelsPerM 4 bytes 002Ah vertical resolution: Pixels/meter
Number of actually used colors. For a 8-bit /
Colors Used 4 bytes 002Eh
pixel bitmap this will be 100h or 256.
Important 4 bytes 0032h Number of important colors
Colors 0 = all
ColorTable 4 * NumColors bytes 0036h present only if [Link] less than 8
colors should be ordered by importance
Red 1 byte Red intensity
Green 1 byte Green intensity
Blue 1 byte Blue intensity
reserved 1 byte unused (=0)
repeated NumColors times
[Link]
Pixel Data The image data
bytes
Bits Per Pixel Field
Value Description
The bitmap is monochrome, and the palette contains two entries. Each bit in the bitmap
array represents a pixel. If the bit is clear, the pixel is displayed with the color of the first
1
entry in the palette; if the bit is set, the pixel has the color of the second entry in the
table.
The bitmap has a maximum of 16 colors, and the palette contains up to 16 entries. Each
pixel in the bitmap is represented by a 4-bit index into the palette. For example, if the
4 first byte in the bitmap is 1Fh, the byte represents two pixels. The first pixel contains the
color in the second palette entry, and the second pixel contains the color in the sixteenth
palette entry.
The bitmap has a maximum of 256 colors, and the palette contains up to 256 entries. In
8
this case, each byte in the array represents a single pixel.
16 The bitmap has a maximum of 2^16 colors. If the Compression field of the bitmap file is
set to BI_RGB, the Palette field does not contain any entries. Each word in the bitmap
array represents a single pixel. The relative intensities of red, green, and blue are
represented with 5 bits for each color component. The value for blue is in the least
significant 5 bits, followed by 5 bits each for green and red, respectively. The most
significant bit is not used.
If the Compression field of the bitmap file is set to BI_BITFIELDS, the Palette field
contains three 4 byte color masks that specify the red, green, and blue components,
respectively, of each pixel. Each 2 bytes in the bitmap array represents a single pixel.
The bitmap has a maximum of 2^24 colors, and the Palette field does not contain any
24 entries. Each 3-byte triplet in the bitmap array represents the relative intensities of blue,
green, and red, respectively, for a pixel.
Additional Info
Each scan line is zero padded to the nearest 4-byte boundary. If the image has a width that is
not divisible by four, say, 21 bytes, there would be 3 bytes of padding at the end of every scan
line.
Scan lines are stored bottom to top instead of top to bottom.
RGB values are stored backwards i.e. BGR.
4 bit & 8 bit BMPs can be compressed. BMPs use a very simple form of compression called Run
Length Encoded (RLE). Instead of storing a value for each pixel RLE stores a number, N,
followed by an index. This means that the next N pixels are of the color for this index.
For additional information refer to:
MSDN Library: Bitmap Storage
The Graphics File Formats Page - BMP
Compiled by Nathan Liesch of Imperium Accelero 9000
With guidance from:
