An analysis of color removal method based on a signed color distance and its calculation cost reduction

In order to convert a color image into a monochrome one, luminance components of the pixels have been used as gray-levels for the representation of the monochrome image in HDTV standard. However, saliencies of the image embedded only in the chrominance components are disappeared in the monochrome image converted by using luminance components. To cope with this problem, A.A. Gooch et al. have proposed the salience-preserving color removal method called “Color2Gray.“ In this paper, at first, Color2Gray is analyzed and its mathematical property is revealed. Then, fast Color2Gray algorithm is proposed by use of the mathematical property. Finally, some experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.