Image Color Summarizer

the image color summarizer

The colour summarizer will produce descriptive colour statistics for an image. Reported will be the average, median or mode, minimum and maximum of each RGB and HSV triplet element. Some of the questions the summarizer will answer are

what is the average color hue, saturation and value in my image?
what is the RGB colour that is most representative of the image?
what do the RGB and HSV histograms look like?
what is the image's human readable colour description (e.g. dark pure blue)?

The purpose of this utility is to generate metadata that summarizes an image's colour characteristics for inclusion in an image database, such as Flickr. In particular this tool is being used to generate metadata for Flickr's Color Fields group.

get started already

If you are curious, see the summarizer run. You may want to see see canned examples. Of course, why not provide your own image for analysis? You should read the FAQ to see how things work.

You can use the summarizer as a simple web service. Learn how to get statistics in XML format, or see a live XML example of this analysis).

an example

(A) RGB histograms

(B) HLS histograms

(D) representative HLS triplet

(E) independent statistics for R/G/B

(F) representative RGB value

issues

Image statistics are computed using every pixel in the image. Therefore, analysis of images in which the background is dominant will be skewed by the background color. Specifically, statistics for product images (e.g. an items photographed on a white background) can be difficult to interpret. The answer to this is to mask areas of the image before carrying out statistics, but this is not implemented.