An image-based approach for building fuzzy color spaces

Abstract

Color is one of the most used features for image analysis. However, two uncertainty problems arise in this scope: first, color computer representation does not match with how humans understand the color concept; second, the color feature is imprecise by nature. For this reason, fuzzy colors and fuzzy color spaces were developed as a suitable way to model color categories. The most recent and best accurate approaches use crisp color prototypes to build fuzzy color spaces, considering standard and fixed set of colors prototypes (such as ISCC-NBS system) for this purpose. The use of these types of general purpose prototypes may not be flexible enough to collect particular colors of a given image (or a set of images); in addition, image colors may be context dependent in some cases (for example, red color in winery or medicine context). In order to solve these drawbacks, in this paper we propose to learn fuzzy color spaces by analyzing the relevant colors in a given set of representative images for a specific context and/or application; then, we will use them as prototypes in order to build adaptive fuzzy color spaces. Some real experiments are performed in order to illustrate the advantages of our proposal.