Extraction of perceptually important colors and similarity measurement for image matching

We present a color matching algorithm that models the behavior of the human visual system in capturing color appearance of an image. We first develop a new method for color codebook design. The method is well suited for creating small color codebooks used in image analysis and retrieval. We then introduce a statistical technique to extract perceptually relevant colors. We also propose a new color metric that guarantees optimality in matching different color components of two images. Experiments comparing the new algorithm to several existing ones show that it provides a better match to human perception of color similarity.