Image processing-based method for glass tiles colour matching

Abstract

Furniture glass tiles are increasingly used for covering walls and facades or for conferring fashionable aesthetical properties to buildings. Companies that produce furniture glass tiles of a desired colour are devoted to performing a colour comparison between the manufactured glass tiles and the ones desired by a customer, or provided by a catalogue. Still today, such a comparison, known as ‘colour matching’, is mainly performed by company experts by means of a visual inspection, thus leading to a subjective and qualitative colour assessment. A number of methods for colour matching have been afforded in the literature in several industrial fields such as textile, plastics or food; unfortunately, to the best of author’s knowledge, no practical method for glass tiles colour matching has been devised until today. The present work provides an image processing-based method capable of carrying out non-patterned glass tiles colour matching. The method is devised using an appositely developed hardware so as to extract a series of statistical data from scanned images of 10 mm sized glass tiles and, on the basis of the definition of two novel colour distance formulas, endows with colour matching. The achieved colour matching performance agrees in 91% of tests with expert-performed colour classification. The provided formulas are meant to be of general usage for assessing glass tiles colour matching.