[R] measuring distances between colours?

John Fox jfox at mcmaster.ca
Thu May 30 14:47:34 CEST 2013


Hi Jim,

Thanks for this. 

Ben's function makes comparisons in the RGB rather than the HSV colour space; works on the decimal rather than hex representation of colours; applies to a single colour rather than a vector; recomputes the CSV representation of the named colours each time it's called rather than using a closure; and returns more than one colour when there are ties for the best match. But otherwise, the two functions are similar, in that each is based on Euclidean distance in the colour space. 

My superficial reading about colour spaces suggested that distances in the HSV space are more closely related to perceptual differences in colours than are distances in the RGB space. 

Best,
 John

On Thu, 30 May 2013 22:30:18 +1000
 Jim Lemon <jim at bitwrit.com.au> wrote:
> On 05/30/2013 10:13 PM, John Fox wrote:
> > Dear r-helpers,
> >
> > I'm interested in locating the named colour that's "closest" to an arbitrary RGB colour. The best that I've been able to come up is the following, which uses HSV colours for the comparison:
> >
> > r2c<- function(){
> >      hexnumerals<- 0:15
> >      names(hexnumerals)<- c(0:9, LETTERS[1:6])
> >      hex2decimal<- function(hexnums){
> >          hexnums<- strsplit(hexnums, "")
> >          decimals<- matrix(0, 3, length(hexnums))
> >          decimals[1, ]<- sapply(hexnums, function(x)
> >                                   sum(hexnumerals[x[1:2]] * c(16, 1)))
> >          decimals[2, ]<- sapply(hexnums, function(x)
> >                                   sum(hexnumerals[x[3:4]] * c(16, 1)))
> >          decimals[3, ]<- sapply(hexnums, function(x)
> >                                   sum(hexnumerals[x[5:6]] * c(16, 1)))
> >          decimals
> >      }
> >      colors<- colors()
> >      hsv<- rgb2hsv(col2rgb(colors))
> >      function(cols){
> >          cols<- sub("^#", "", toupper(cols))
> >          dec.cols<- rgb2hsv(hex2decimal(cols))
> >          colors[apply(dec.cols, 2, function(dec.col)
> >              which.min(colSums((hsv - dec.col)^2)))]
> >      }
> > }
> >
> > rgb2col<- r2c()
> >
> > I've programmed this with a closure so that hsv gets computed only once.
> >
> > Examples:
> >
> >> rgb2col(c("AA0000", "002200", "000099", "333300", "BB00BB", "#005555"))
> > [1] "darkred"   "darkgreen" "blue4"     "darkgreen" "magenta3"  "darkgreen"
> >> rgb2col(c("AAAA00", "#00AAAA"))
> > [1] "darkgoldenrod" "cyan4"
> >
> > Some of these colour matches, e.g., "#005555" ->  "darkgreen" seem poor to me. Even if the approach is sound, I'd like to be able to detect that there is no sufficiently close match in the vector of named colours. That is, can I establish a maximum acceptable distance in the HSV (or some other) colour space?
> >
> > I vaguely recall a paper or discussion concerning colour representation in R but can't locate it.
> >
> > Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> >
> > John
> >
> Hi John,
> Ben Bolker contributed a function (color.id) to the plotrix package that does something like this. Although it uses RGB colorspace, it might be useful:
> 
> color.id<-function (col) {
>      c2 <- col2rgb(col)
>      coltab <- col2rgb(colors())
>      cdist <- apply(coltab, 2, function(z) sum((z - c2)^2))
>      colors()[which(cdist == min(cdist))]
> }
> 
> Jim



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