Color removal method of considering distance in color space

In a color-to-gray conversion, which only considers lightness components, difference of colors are not appropriately reflected in monochrome images. Gooch et al. have proposed a color removal method that considers the differences of colors. Although the method can obtain good results in many cases, there is room for improvement. In this paper, a new color removal method that introduces a weight to Gooch's algorithm is proposed. In the proposed method, for combinations of colors of each pixel in an input image, weights are determined by distance in color space. In the proposed method, unimportant color combinations are not considered by weight and color information in an input image is appropriately reflected in a monochrome image. The validity of the proposed method is shown by experiments using some images. (C) 2014 The Japan Society of Applied Physics