A Robust Hue Descriptor

Abstract

A hue descriptor based on Logvinenko's illuminantinvariant object colour atlas [1] is tested in terms of how well it maps hues to the hue names found in Moroney's Colour Thesaurus [2] [3] and how well it maps hues of Munsell papers to their corresponding Munsell hue designator. Called the KSM hue descriptor, it correlates hue with the central wavelength of a Gaussian-shaped reflectance function. An important feature of this representation is that the set of hue descriptors inherits the illuminate invariant property of Logvinenko's object colour atlas. Despite the illuminant invariance of the atlas and the hue descriptors, metamer mismatching means that colour stimulus shift [4] can occur, which will inevitably lead to some hue shifts. However, tests show that KSM hue is robust in the sense that it is much more stable under a change of illuminant than CIELAB hue.