A Parametric Colour-difference Study on the Separation and CMF Effects

Abstract

An experiment was carried out to investigate separation and CMF effects on colour-difference evaluation using display colours. In total, 1120 sample pairs around 5 CIE recommended colour centres were assessed 20 times using the grey-scale method. Sample pairs were selected to have colour-difference of 4 and 8 CIELAB units, include or exclude separation between two colours on a pair, have four fields of view (FoVs), 2º, 4º, 10º and 20º. The experiment results were used to test 3 colour-difference equations or uniform colour spaces, CIELAB, CIEDE2000 and CAM16-UCS. For separation (S) sample pairs, CIEDE2000 performed the best, followed by CAM16-UCS and CIELAB the worst. For no-separation (NS) sample pairs, all models gave worse performance than separation (S) sample pairs. The parametric formula derived earlier was verified to predict colour-difference for sample pairs to have no-separation line. Five colour matching functions (CMFs), CIE 1931, CIE 1964, CIE 2006-2º, CIE 2006-10º and 2006-4º were tested and the results indicated very small CMF effect on calculating colour-difference.