A real-time mapping technique enables full-color rendering of multispectral nighttime images, making them as clear and colorful as daylight ones.Night vision cameras are a vital source of information for a wide range of critical military and law enforcement applications such as surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, and security. Currently, monochrome display of night imagery is still the standard. However, monochrome images often do not look natural, provide lower feature contrast, and they tend to induce visual illusions and fatigue. Intuitive color representations of night-vision imagery may alleviate these problems.The increasing availability of multi-spectral, night-vision systems has led to a growing interest in the color display of night imagery. Color may improve feature contrast and reduce visual clutter, thus enabling better scene recognition, object detection, and depth perception. Most current techniques to colorize multi-band, night-time imagery are computationally expensive or do not yield natural and stable color settings. To resolve these issues, we developed a simple color remapping technique that provides colored night-time imagery with an intuitive and stable appearance. 1 The method is computationally efficient and can easily be deployed in real-time.Our color remapping technique assumes a fixed relation between false color tuples and natural color triplets for bands near the visual spectrum. This allows its implementation as a simple color-table swapping operation. For bands that are not correlated with the visual spectrum, color remapping can be used to enhance the detectability of targets through contrast enhancement and color highlighting.We achieved color remapping by associating the multi-band sensor signal to an indexed false color image and swapping its color table with that of a regular daylight color image of a similar scene (see Figure 1). A wide range of environments can be represented with only a limited number of color tables. These tables need to be constructed only once before the system is deployed. The derivation of the color transformation requires a color photograph representing the intended operating theater or a similar, but not necessarily the same, environment. Then there are two options: either transfer the color statistics of this photograph to the false color multi-spectral image (when both images represent different but similar scenes), or establish a samplebased mapping between corresponding pixel values. 1 To achieve an efficient real-time implementation, we used indexed, color-image representations and performed all required Continued on next page