A color metric for computer vision

The authors develop a color space metric which is useful for computer vision. While there is no shortage of proposed methods for quantifying how the human eye perceives color differences, it is difficult to apply these perceptual metrics directly to the color images sensed by a computer vision system. The metric developed can be applied to images sensed using color filters (e.g. red, green, or blue) as is often done in computer vision. The metric is defined in terms of the spectral characteristics of the filters and camera and accounts for their noise properties. The color distance function is derived as an estimate of the physical distance between normalized spectral power distributions. Components of this distance are weighted to account for sensor noise properties. A color metric has several possible uses in a computer vision system. The usefulness of the color metric is demonstrated by evaluating its performance on regions of real images