In computer graphics and photography, a color histogram is a representation of the distribution of colors in an image, derived by counting the number of pixels of each of given set of color ranges in a typically two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) color space. Computer graphics are Graphics created by Computers and more generally the Representation and Manipulation of Pictorial Data Photography (fә'tɒgrәfi or fә'tɑːgrәfi (from Greek φωτο and γραφία is the process and Art of recording pictures by means of capturing In Digital imaging, a pixel ( pict ure el ement is the smallest piece of information in an image In mathematics the dimension of a Space is roughly defined as the minimum number of Coordinates needed to specify every point within it A Color model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way Colors can be represented as Tuples of numbers typically as three or four values or color components
A histogram is a standard statistical description of a distribution in terms of occurrence frequencies of different event classes; for color, the event classes are regions in color space. In Statistics, a histogram is a Graphical display of tabulated frequencies, shown as Bars It shows what proportion of cases fall into each of Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection analysis interpretation or explanation and presentation of Data. In Statistics, a frequency distribution is a list of the values that a variable takes in a sample.
An image histogram of scalar pixel values is more commonly used in image processing than is a color histogram. An image histogram is type of Histogram which acts as a graphical representation of the tonal distribution in a Digital image. Image processing is any form of Signal processing for which the input is an image such as photographs or frames of video the output of image processing can be either an image
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Color histograms are flexible constructs that can be built from images in various color spaces, whether RGB, rg chromaticity or any other color space of any dimension. A Color model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way Colors can be represented as Tuples of numbers typically as three or four values or color components An RGB color space is any additive Color space based on the RGB color model. The rg chromaticity space is a two-dimensional Color space in which there is no color intensity information A histogram of an image is produced first by discretization of the colors in the image into a number of bins, and counting the number of image pixels in each bin. For example, a Red–Blue chromaticity histogram can be formed by first normalizing color pixel values by dividing RGB values by R+G+B, then quantizing the normalized R and B coordinates into N bins each; say N = 4, which might yield a 2D histogram that looks like this table:
| red | |||||
| 0-63 | 64-127 | 128-191 | 192-255 | ||
| blue | 0-63 | 43 | 78 | 18 | 0 |
| 64-127 | 45 | 67 | 33 | 2 | |
| 128-191 | 127 | 58 | 25 | 8 | |
| 192-255 | 140 | 47 | 47 | 13 | |
Similarly a histogram can be made three-dimensional, though it is harder to display. [1]
The histogram provides a compact summarization of the distribution of data in an image. The color histogram of an image is relatively invariant with translation and rotation about the viewing axis, and varies only slowly with the angle of view. [2] By comparing histograms signatures of two images and matching the color content of one image with the other, the color histogram is particularly well suited for the problem of recognizing an object of unknown position and rotation within a scene. Importantly, translation of an RGB image into the illumination invariant rg-chromaticity space allows the histogram to operate well in varying light levels.
The main drawback of histograms for classification is that the representation is dependent of the color of the object being studied, ignoring its shape and texture. Color histograms can potentially be identical for two images with different object content which happens to share color information. Conversely, without spatial or shape information, similar objects of different color may be indistinguishable based solely on color histogram comparisons. There is no way to distinguish a red and white cup from a red and white plate. Put another way, histogram-based algorithms have no concept of a generic 'cup', and a model of a red and white cup is no use when given an otherwise identical blue and white cup.
Further research into the relationship between color histograms data to the physical properties of the objects in an image has shown they can represent not only object color and illumination but relate to surface roughness and image geometry and provide improved estimate of illumination and object color. [3]
In photography, color histograms in either 2D or 3D spaces are frequently used in digital cameras for estimating the scene illumination, as part of the camera's automatic white balance algorithm. Photography (fә'tɒgrәfi or fә'tɑːgrәfi (from Greek φωτο and γραφία is the process and Art of recording pictures by means of capturing In remote sensing, color histograms are typical features used for classifying different ground regions from aerial or satellite photographs. Remote sensing is the small or large-scale acquisition of information of an object or phenomenon by the use of either recording or real-time sensing device(s that is not in physical In the case of multi-spectral images, the histograms may be four-dimensional, or more. In Computer vision, color histograms can be used in object recognition. Computer vision is the science and technology of machines that see Object recognition in Computer vision is a task of finding given object in an image or video sequence
Color Histograms are a commonly used as appearance-based signature to classify images for content-based image retrieval systems (CBIR). Content-based image retrieval ( CBIR) also known as query by image content ( QBIC) and content-based visual information retrieval ( CBVIR [4] By adding additional information to global color histogram signature, such as spatial information, or by dividing an image into regions and storing local histograms for each of these areas, the signature for each image becomes increasingly robust. Local color histograms are robust to partial occlusion and can be more efficient than global histograms for image retrieval in some cases. [5] For example, applying a weighted color histogram based on color ratios to local histograms, illumination-insensitive object extraction can be achieved. [6] Another techniques for increasing the robustness of color histograms is to incorporate directional edge information to retain spatial information. [5]
In one large scale image database application, over 15000 images could be queried in under two seconds by refining color histograms using a technique called color coherence vector. [7]