Automatic colour detection for car repainting

Repainting a small damaged area on a car panel may lead to repainting the whole panel if there was inaccurate colour match. This would be time-consuming and expensive. Therefore it is very important to achieve an accurate colour matching which leads to a neat repainting job as well as cost-effective. Although the initial colour code of the car is usually provided by the car manufacturing company, it actually changes with time due to weather conditions and successive car washing with various detergents. The paper describes the design and development of a prototype unit for colour detection. The unit captures a picture for small undamaged part of the car panel. This picture is passed to a program for analyzing and coding the actual colour to its basic colour percentages. Although the proposed system focuses on car repainting application, it may also be used in other industries such as in printing industry.