A Comparison of Extracted Dominant Colours of Twelve Cosmopolitan Cities

Abstract

Abstract: Metropolitan cities are large multi-cultural urban areas. Their colour schemes, which contribute to their unique identities, are influenced by factors, such as when the city was established, climate, city ordinances, and cultural heritage. City colours also evolve overtime due to new construction materials, innovative building designs, and urban development. The objective of this study is to determine if there are similarities in dominant colours for twelve metropolitan cities spanning six continents. They include Cairo, Cape Town, Singapore, Tokyo, Perth, Sydney, London, Madrid, Mexico City, New York City, Buenos Aires, and Lima. The Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) colour extraction technique was used to extract five dominant colours from images of these twelve cities. The extracted dominant colours were outputted as hexadecimal codes with their corresponding names obtained from the color-name.com website. Results show that some of these cities have similar dominant colours. Two colours, cobalt blue and sonic silver, are found in 25% of the cities. Furthermore, ten colours are present in pairs of cities. Most notably, some cities share two of the five dominant colours. Mexico City and New York City both have eerie black and platinum in their colour schemes, while Singapore and Lima share Charleston Green and Gainsboro. Cape Town and Perth both have light cobalt blue and sonic silver in their colour patterns, while Madrid and Buenos Aires share khaki and shadow colours. Dominant colours identified as a result of this investigation could be used to produce colour palettes for these cities. Since colour is an important component of urban development and preservation projects, the ones that incorporate aspects of existing colours would create buildings that are harmonious with the cultural heritage as well as the overall colour scheme of this city. Keywords: Colour extraction, Fuzzy c-means (FCM), soft clustering, unsupervised learning, machine learning, cosmopolitan cities, dominant colours, city colour palettes