How to compare two colors for similarity/difference

by

See Wikipedia’s article on Color Difference for the right leads.
Basically, you want to compute a distance metric in some multidimensional colorspace.

But RGB is not “perceptually uniform”, so your Euclidean RGB distance metric suggested by Vadim will not match the human-perceived distance between colors. For a start, L*a*b* is intended to be a perceptually uniform colorspace, and the deltaE metric is commonly used. But there are more refined colorspaces and more refined deltaE formulas that get closer to matching human perception.

You’ll have to learn more about colorspaces and illuminants to do the conversions. But for a quick formula that is better than the Euclidean RGB metric, just do this:

  • Assume that your RGB values are in the sRGB colorspace
  • Find the sRGB to L*a*b* conversion formulas
  • Convert your sRGB colors to L*a*b*
  • Compute deltaE between your two L*a*b* values

It’s not computationally expensive, it’s just some nonlinear formulas and some multiplications and additions.

More Related Contents:

  1. HSL to RGB color conversion
  2. Algorithm to check similarity of colors
  3. How does one convert 16-bit RGB565 to 24-bit RGB888?
  4. RGB value base color name
  5. RGB values of visible spectrum
  6. Algorithm for Additive Color Mixing for RGB Values
  7. How to Convert RGB Color to HSV?
  8. Determine font color based on background color
  9. Algorithm to randomly generate an aesthetically-pleasing color palette [closed]
  10. RGB to HSV in PHP
  11. Is there an algorithm for color mixing that works like mixing real colors?
  12. Function for creating color wheels [closed]
  13. Smooth spectrum for Mandelbrot Set rendering
  14. Compare RGB colors in c#
  15. HSV to RGB Color Conversion
  16. “Rounding” colour values to the nearest of a small set of colours
  17. PHP HSV to RGB formula comprehension
  18. Color gradient algorithm
  19. Word comparison algorithm
  20. Convert light frequency to RGB?
  21. What is the best algorithm for finding the closest color in an array to another color? [closed]
  22. complexity in terms of big O
  23. Why is the constant always dropped from big O analysis?
  24. What algorithm gives suggestions in a spell checker?
  25. How can I measure the similarity between two images? [closed]
  26. Find connected components in a graph [closed]
  27. Two Rectangles intersection
  28. Examples of Algorithms which has O(1), O(n log n) and O(log n) complexities
  29. Is there any fast method of matrix exponentiation?
  30. How to find the number of different shortest paths between two vertices, in directed graph and with linear-time?

Leave a Comment