The potential importance of color in surveillance applications
can be illustrated very clearly: turn off the color
on a television monitor to make it a monochrome scene.
It is obvious how much information is lost when the colors
in the scene change to shades of gray. Objects that
were easily identified in the color scene become difficult
to identify in the monochrome scene. It is much easier to
pick out a person with a red shirt in the color image than
in a monochrome image.