bit-plane format, most notably PC with EGA graphics card, the Amiga and Atari ST, contrasting with the more common packed format. This allowed certain classes of image manipulation to be performed using bitwise operations (especially by a blitter chip), and parallax scrolling effects. Video motion estimation 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). This can sometimes provide a good enough approximation for correlation operations with minimal computational cost. This relies on an observation that the spatial information is more significant than the actual values. Convolutions may be reduced to bit shift and popcount operations, or performed in dedicated hardware. Neural nets Bitplane formats may be used for passing images to Spiking neural networks, or low precision approximations to neural networks/convolutional neural networks. Programs Many image processing packages can split an image into bit-planes. Open source tools such as Pamarith from Netpbm and Convert from ImageMagick can be used to generate bit-planes. See also Color depth Planar Binary image References Bit data structures