Trigit: A free web application for rapid colorimetric analysis of images

Abstract

Color visualization is one of the fundamental aspects in advancing many scientific fields. For example, monitoring color change has been used to identify abnormalities in health, environmental, water, agricultural, and food quality. Human color vision is subjective, and objective colorimetric analysis is essential to prevent incorrect deductions. ImageJ program is commonly used to process color images. Although versatile, ImageJ is neither designed nor optimized for color extraction and analysis. As such, the color extraction process is slow and the user interface is not intuitive. To streamline this process, we designed Trigit (http://trigit.com.au) as a free, rapid, and user-friendly web app to quantify color signals from images. The estimated analysis time is ∼1.5 min for new users and <20 s for experienced users, independent of the color space (CIELAB, HSV, CMYK, RGB, HEX). Compared to ImageJ, Trigit is 4–9 times and 10–15 times faster in extracting RGB and non-RGB color values, respectively, in a format that can be easily exported to a Microsoft Excel program. Trigit can be pre-downloaded into portable drives to enable use without internet access. Trigit can also be accessed from smartphones for on-site color extraction. We believe that Trigit's intuitive and rapid color extraction capability could accelerate the advancement of colorimetric technologies by alleviating the unnecessary time spent during color extraction.

Keywords

• Colorimetric analysis
• Image processing
• Color extraction tool
• RGB extraction
• CMYK extraction
• HSV extraction