The gray level of each pixel in a digital image is stored as one or more bytes in a computer. For an 8-bit image, 0 is encoded as 00000000 and 255 is encoded as 11111111. Any number between 0 t0 255 is encoded as one byte. The bit in the far left side is referred as the most significant bit (MSB) because a change in that bit would significantly change the value encoded by the byte. The bit in the far right is referred as the least significant bit (LSB), because a change in this bit does not change the encoded gray value much. The bit plane representation of an eight-bit digital image is given by:

Bit plane slicing is a method of representing an image with one or more bits of the byte used for each pixel. One can use only MSB to represent the pixel, which reduces the original gray level to a binary image. The three main goals of bit plane slicing is:

• Converting a gray level image to a binary image.
• Representing an image with fewer bits and corresponding the image to a smaller size
• Enhancing the image by focussing.

Bit plane slicing:

Since the given image has a maximum grey level of 7, it is a 3-bit image. We convert the image to binary and separate the bit planes.

Separating the bit planes, we obtain