what is the of converting a L*a*b image to double precision

clear all;
close all;
he= imread('D:\sharath\major project\photos\imag17.jpg');
figure(1),imshow(he);
cform = makecform('srgb2lab');
lab_he = applycform(he,cform);
figure(2),imshow(lab_he);
ab = double(lab_he(:,:,2:3));

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

It’s not obvious from that code snippet what the reason is for the conversion to double. However for numerical reasons (most notably precision) many functions require double precision data as arguments, and many images are characteristically uint8. It is likely that some function over the horizon in that code (that we can’t see) requires double-precision variables.