Measuring perceived color difference using YIQ NTSC transmission color space in mobile applications

Abstract

An alternative color difference formulas are presented for measuring the perceived difference between two color samples defined in YIQ color space. The classical color difference formulas such as CIELAB, CIELUV and their derivatives require many arithmetic transformations of the input values commonly given using red, green and blue components, making these formulas cumbersome to implement on mobile devices. The alternative formulas based on YIQ color space presented in this work are lightweight and can be quickly calculated, even in real-time. The comparison is made between the newly introduced formulas and the classical ones using two different sets of experiments. The first set of experiments is focused on evaluating the perceived difference of colors using different formulas for picking colors. The second set of experiments allows benchmarking of the color difference formulas to evaluate their performance when processing images. The experimental results show that the newly introduced formulas are close in perceived terms to CIELAB and CIELUV but are significantly faster, making them good candidates for measuring color difference on mobile devices and applications even in real-time.

Keywords

• Color difference
• color metric
• YIQ
• Perceptual uniformity
• Color space