Bit plane
![The 8 bit-planes of a gray-scale image (the one on left). There are eight because the original image uses eight bits per pixel.](/Images/godic/202412/24/Lichtenstein_bitplanes3048.png")
A bit plane of a digital discrete signal (such as image or sound) is a set of bits corresponding to a given bit position in each of the binary numbers representing the signal.
For example, for 16-bit data representation there are 16 bit planes: the first bit plane contains the set of the most significant bit, and the 16th contains the least significant bit.