An Analysis of Selected Computer Interchange Color Spaces

Abstract

Important standards for device-independent color allow many different color encodings. This freedom obliges users of these standards to choose the color space in which to represent their data. A device-independent interchange color space must exhibit an exact mapping to a colorimetric color representation, ability to encode all visible colors, compact representation for given accuracy, and low computational cost for transforms to and from device-dependent spaces. The performance of CIE 1931 XYZ, CIELUV, CIELAB, YES, CCIR 601-2 YCbCr, and SMPTE-C RGB is measured against these requirements. With extensions, all of these spaces can meet the first two requirements. Quantizing error dominates the representational errors of the tested color spaces. Spaces that offer low quantization error also have low gain for image noise. All linear spaces are less compact than nonlinear alternatives. The choice of nonlinearity is not critical; a wide range of gammas yields acceptable results. The choice of primaries for RGB representations is not critical, except that high-chroma primaries should be avoided. Quantizing the components of the candidate spaces with varying precision yields only small improvements. Compatibility with common image data compression techniques leads to the requirement for low luminance contamination, a property that compromises several otherwise acceptable spaces. The conversion of a device-independent representation to popular device spaces by means of trilinear interpolation requires substantially fewer lookup table entries with CCIR 601-2 YCbCr and CIELAB. © 1992, ACM. All rights reserved.