white balance gains and matrix values are stored as the whole number part of value x 1024 this resealing at the end of the processing but prior to lookup adds 3 shifts per pixel computational complexity of the embodiment the computational complexity in terms of number of operations will now be assessed for this purpose operations will be split into two categories 1 multiplications and 2 data access tests additions shifts lookups and offset calculations it should also be noted that each implementation is likely to differ slightly from this count so the figures presented here should be taken as an estimate in addition some conditions of the algorithm relating to saturated pixels can alter the computational complexity for a given scene for example a scene which is very badly over exposed will take longer to colorize using quad than a scene that is well exposed few saturated pixels on the whole it is the automatic exposure control aec algorithm 39 s job to provide a well exposed image this is therefore assumed in the following calculation stats gathering is an insignificant overhead when using subsampling of 8 or 16 and can be treated as zero if subsampling is assumed example performance figures the table below shows the measured processing time for a vga sized bayer image 640 u00d7 480 on a 2 6 ghz pentium4 pc running win2k with 512 mb of ram also shown are estimated cpu loading figures for several specs of machine processing vga sized images at 30 frames per second general discussion modifications may be made to the foregoing embodiment within the scope of the present invention the method of the invention may be implemented wholly or partially in hardware rather than software for example the image sensor will typically be formed.