A study of efficiency and accuracy in the transformation from RGB to CIELAB color space

The perceptually uniform color space CIELAB (Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage) is useful for image analysis, particularly in applications involving color acceptability decision making; however, the transformation of an entire red-green-blue (RGB) color image is very time consuming. Various techniques are investigated for approximating the nonlinear function, and their performance in terms of speed and accuracy is assessed. This article arises from a project that aims to use video cameras to monitor the color of manufactured products.