Gamut ID

New technologies in capturing and displaying wide gamut images and new standards for wide gamut colour encoding enable a new market of wide-gamut content creation (video, images, games, electronic documents). One obstacle for adopting wide gamut content in motion picture creation is the compatibility of wide gamut content to the employed displays. The term display includes here any video colour reproduction devices, such as projectors, direct view displays and film printers. More specifically, the issue is: how can wide gamut content be created without knowing the display colour gamut and how can colour be reproduced in the display without knowing the colour gamut of the pictorial content? This paper proposes to associate metadata to wide gamut content called "gamut identity metadata" or "gamut ID metadata". It allows a display with arbitrary colour gamut to reproduce content with an arbitrary colour gamut while ensuring controlled quality for out-of-gamut and near-gamut- border colours. The gamut ID metadata consists of a 3D indexed faces set building a gamut boundary description which is organized into three levels. The faces-based three level structure allows for: support of graphics hardware, scalability, memory footprint efficiency, convex handling of non-convex gamuts, handling of colour preferences, and handling of gamut cusps. The Gamut ID metadata is proposed for standardization of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and considered as solution for integration into high definition multimedia interface (HDMI).