Improving `Color to Gray and Back' using Kekre's LUV Color Space

The reversible method of converting color images into gray images has been recently proposed using YCbCr color space and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The method embeds the colors of original colored image into the gray image using DWT. The gray image is being converted to textured gray because of color information embedding. This textured gray image could be either printed or sent to the receiver with the size less than the original color image. After receiving the textured gray image, receiver applies DWT on it and extracts the veiled color information to reconstruct the color image. The printed textured gray image is scanned for digitization and then the techniques discussed here can extract the colors of image to recreate the original color image. Using Kekre's LUV color space for the technique improves the quality of recreated colored image. Also the matted gray image has better quality and eye perception than using YCbCr color space. Applications of this can be compressing the image data for transmission and printing the color images using black color cartridge only and regenerating the color images afterwards. The improvement in recovered color image and matted gray image are shown in results and supported by statistical data.