A Comparison of RGB and HSV Colour Spaces for Visual Attention Models

Different approaches to detecting objects have used either perceptionally nonuniform or human perception based colour spaces to mimics human vision in machines. In this paper, we have compared nonuniform RGB derived opponencies with the HSV colour space. The main motivation about this particular comparison is to improve the quality of saliency detection in challenging situations such as lighting change. Here, Precision-Recall curves are used to compare the colour spaces using bottom-up pyramidal and top-down non-pyramidal saliency models. Our study concludes that if we combine the Saturation-Value or Hue-Value channels then this improves the detection of salient objects and gives a higher Precision-Recall curve. We have also shown in the paper that the RGB colour space gives a low precision score as it detects the object using the colour information present in an image.