Color naming: color scientists do it between Munsell sheets of color

Abstract

With the advent of high dynamic range imaging and wide gamut color spaces, gamut mapping algorithms have to nudge image colors much more drastically to constrain them within a rendering device's gamut. Classical colorimetry is concerned with color matching and the developed color difference metrics are for small distances. For larger distances, categorization becomes a more useful concept. In the gamut mapping case, lexical distance induced by color names is a more useful metric, which translates to the condition that a nudged color may not cross a name boundary. The new problem is to find these color name boundaries. We compare the experimental procedures used for color naming by linguists, ethnologists, and color scientists and propose a methodology that leads to robust repeatable experiments.

Is it turquoise + fuchsia = purple or is it turquoise + fuchsia = blue?

“…We have seen, that we can communicate the appearance of a specific brown, for example, by transmitting three numbers like (A, T, V ) = (20,25,60). Although painting by numbers is very efficient, as humans we tend to be not very good at keeping a numerical color atlas in our head, so for our daily life we need a method with a much lower cognitive load.…”

“…Our solution is the use of crowd-sourcing, as we detailed in last year's paper at this conference 20 and summarized in the flowchart Fig. 19.…”

“…Similarly, a tanner who has to ensure that all leather swatches making up a handbag have the same color, let us say (A, T, V ) = (20,25,60), can verify that each swatch is more similar to this sample than to any of the 26 adjacent samples in the atlas (eight on the same page and nine each on the preceding and following pages).…”

“…The second coordinate is the abscissa T , and the third the ordinate V . When we need to communicate a color, we look up the closest sample in the atlas and then transmit three numbers, for example (A, T, V ) = (20,25,60). The receivers consult their Coloroid atlas to see this color's sample.…”

“…Color chips given to diners upon entering the cafeteria (multiple copies were made). The color terms are from the color thesaurus 20 and the chip colors were created by adding noise to the centroids. Fig.…”