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Chapter 4 Color in Image and Video

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Chapter 4 Color in Image and Video

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fitsum
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Chapter 4 Color in Image and Video

4.1 Color Science


4.2 Color Models in Images
4.3 Color Models in Video
Further Exploration
4.1 Color Science

5 Light and Spectra


6 Light is an electromagnetic wave. Its color is characterized by the wavelength
content of the light.
a) Laser light consists of a single wavelength: e.g., a ruby laser produces a bright,
scarlet-red beam.
b) Most light sources produce contributions over many wavelengths.
c) However, humans cannot detect all light, just contributions that fall in
the "visible wavelengths".
d) Short wavelengths produce a blue sensation, long wavelengths produce
a red one.
Spectrophotometer: device used to measure visible light, by reflecting light from a
diffraction grating(a ruled surface) that spreads out the different wavelengths.

• Figure 4.1 shows the phenomenon that white light contains all the colors of a
rainbow.

• Visible light is an electromagnetic wave in the range 400 nm to 700 nm


(where nm stands for nanometer, 10−9 meters).

Fig. 4.2 shows the relative power in each wavelength interval for typical outdoor light
on a sunny day.
This type of curve is called a Spectral Power Distribution (SPD) or a
spectrum.
The symbol for wavelength is λ. This curve is called E(λ).
Human Vision
The eye works like a camera, with the lens focusing an image onto the retina (upside-
down and left-right reversed).
• The retina consists of an array of rods and three kinds of cones.
• The rods come into play when light levels are low and produce a image in shades
of gray ("all cats are gray at night!").
• For higher light levels, the cones each produce a signal. Because of their
differing pigments, the three kinds of cones are most sensitive to red (R), green
(G), and blue (B) light.
It seems likely that the brain makes use of differences R-G, G-B, and B-R, as well as
combining all of R, G, and B into a high-light-level achromatic channel.
• The eye is most sensitive to light in the middle of the visible spectrum.
• The sensitivity of our receptors is also a function of wavelength (Fig. 4.3 below).
• The Blue receptor sensitivity is not shown to scale because it is much smaller
than the curves for Red or Green — Blue is a late addition, in evolution.
– Statistically, Blue is the favorite color of humans, regardless of nationality —
perhaps for this reason: Blue is a latecomer and thus is a bit surprising!
• Fig. 4.3 shows the overall sensitivity as a dashed line — this important
curve is called the luminous- efficiency function.
– It is usually denoted V (λ) and is formed as the sum of the response curves
for Red, Green, and Blue.
• The rod sensitivity curve looks like the luminous-efficiency function V(λ) but
is shifted to the red end of the spectrum.
The eye has about 6 million cones, but the proportions of R, G, and B cones are
different. They likely are present in the ratios 40:20:1. So the achromatic channel
produced by the cones is approximately proportional to 2R + G + B/20.

These spectral sensitivity functions are usually denoted by letters other than "R, G, B";
here let's use a vector function q(λ), with components.

q (λ)=(qR(λ),qG(λ),qB(λ))T (4.1)
• The response in each color channel in the eye is proportional to the number of
neurons firing.
• A laser light at wavelength λ would result in a certain number of neurons
firing.An SPD is a combination of single-frequency lights (like "lasers"), so we
add up the cone responses for all wavelengths, weighted by the eye's relative
response at that wavelength.

Image Formation

• Surfaces reflect different amounts of light at different wavelengths, and dark


surfaces reflect less energy than light surfaces.
• Fig. 4.4 shows the surface spectral reflectance from (1) orange sneakers
and
faded bluejeans.The reflectance function is denoted S(λ).

Image formation is thus:


Light from the illuminant with SPD E(λ) impingesona surface, with surface spectral
reflectance function S(λ), is reflected, and then is filtered by the eye's cone functions q
(λ).
Reflection is shown in Fig. 4.5 below
The function C(λ) is called the color signal and consists of the product of E(λ), the
illuminant, times S(λ), the reflectance

The equations that take into account the image formation model are:

Camera Systems
Camera systems are made in a similar fashion; a studio-quality camera has three signals
produced at each pixel location (corresponding to a retinal position)
Analog signals are converted to digital, truncated to integers, and stored. If the precision
used is 8- bit, then the maximum value for any of R, G, B is 255, and the minimum is
0.
However, the light entering the eye of the computer user is that which is emitted by
the screen — the screen is essentially a self-luminous source. Therefore, we need to
know the light E(λ) entering the eye.
Gamma Correction
The light emitted is in fact roughly proportional to the voltage raised to a power; this
power is called gamma, with symbol γ.

Thus, if the file value in the red channel is R, the screen emits light proportional to Rγ,
with SPD equal to that of the red phosphor paint on the screen that is the target of
the red channel electron gun. The value of gamma is around 2.2.
It is customary to append a prime to signals that are gamma-corrected by raising to the
power (1/γ) before transmission. Thus, we arrive at linear signals.

Fig. 4.6(a) shows light output with no gamma-correction applied. We see that darker
values are displayed too dark. This is also shown in Fig. 4.7(a), which displays a linear
ramp from left to right.

Fig. 4.6(b) shows the effect of pre- correcting signals by applying the power law R1/γ;
it is customary to normalize voltage to the range [0,1].
• The combined effect is shown in Fig. 4.7(b). Here, a ramp is shown in 16 steps from
gray-level 0 to gray- level 255.

Fig. 4.7: (a): Display of ramp from 0 to 255, with no gamma correction. (b):
Image with gamma correction applied.
A more careful definition of gamma recognizes that a simple power law would
result in an infinite derivative at zero voltage — makes constructing a circuit to
accomplish gamma correction difficult to devise in analog.
Color-Matching Functions
Even without knowing the eye-sensitivity curves of Fig.4.3, a technique evolved in
psychology for matching a combination of basic R, G, and B lights to a given shade.
• The particular set of three basic lights used in an experiment are called the set
of color primaries.
To match a given color, a subject is asked to separately adjust the brightness of
the three primaries using a set of controls until the resulting spot of light most
closely matches the desired color.
The basic situation is shown in Fig.4.8. A device for carrying out such an
experiment is called a colorimeter.
CIE Chromaticity Diagram
Fig. 4.10: CIE standard XYZ color‐matching functions.

For a general SPD E(λ), the essential "colorimetric" information required to


characterize a color is the set of tristimulus values X,Y , Z defined in analogy
to (Eq. 4.2) as

2D Diagram

• We go to 2D by factoring out the magnitude of vectors(X, Y, Z); we could


divide by, but instead we divide by the sum X + Y + Z to make the chromaticity:
Effectively, we are projecting each tristimulus vector (X, Y, Z) onto the plane
connecting points (1, 0, 0), (0, 1, 0), and (0, 0, 1).
The color matching curves are devised so as to add up to the same value (Fig. 4.10)

— the area under each curve is the same for each of


For an E(λ)=1 for all λ, — an "equi-energy white light”
chromaticity values are (1/3, 1/3). Fig. 4.11 displays a typical actual white point in
the middle of the diagram.
Since x, y ≤ 1and x + y ≤ 1, all possible chromaticity values lie below the dashed
diagonal line in Fig. 4.11.
One may choose different whitespectra as the standard illuminant.
CIE defines several of these, such as illuminant A, illuminant C, and standard daylights
D65 and D100.
Each will display as a somewhat different white spot on CIE diagram.
D65= (0.312713, 0.329016)
illuminant C= (0.310063, 0.316158)

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