Choice of a pertinent color space for color texture characterization using parametric spectral analysis

This article presents a comparison of different color spaces including RGB, IHLS and La (*)b (*) for color texture characterization. This comparison is based on the fusion of the independent spatial structure and color feature cues. In IHLS and L (*)a (*)b (*), two channel complex color images are created from the luminance and the chrominance values. For such images, two dimensional complex multichannel linear prediction models are used to perform parametric power spectrum estimation and the structure feature cues are computed from this estimated power spectrum. Quantitative comparison of auto spectra of luminance and combined chrominance channels for different color spaces is done. This comparison is based on the degree of decorrelation between luminance and chrominance information provided by different color space transformations. Three dimensional histograms are used as color feature cues. Then, to classify color textures, KullbackLeibler divergence based symmetric distance measures are calculated for pure color, luminance structure and chrominance structure feature cues. Individual as well as combined effect of information from all feature cues on classification results is then compared for different color spaces and different color texture data sets. The proposed color texture classification method performs better than the state of the art methods in certain cases. The L (*)a (*)b (*) color space gives us a better characterization of the chrominance spatial structure as well as the overall spatial structure for all of the chosen data sets. Experimental results on pixel classification of color textures are also presented and discussed. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.