Color distance histogram: a novel descriptor for color image segmentation

A novel color image descriptor, called color distance histogram (CDH), is proposed in this paper as a fundamental signal feature, readily to be exploited for various color image applications, such as indexing and retrieval, segmentation, and so on. To establish CDH, color image is first represented in CIE L*a*b* color space, followed by using CIE L*a*b*´s uniform color distance metric on computing the distance of each pixel with respect to the reference color. Consequently, CDH accurately reflects the degree of color similarity of individual pixel with respect to the reference color. To demonstrate the use and effectiveness of CDH, it is further extended into a set of CDHs, called dominant color profile (DCP), for color image segmentation. Experimental results clearly indicate that the proposed CDH-based or DCP-based segmentation method yields superior segmentation to other thresholding and clustering methods, in terms of accuracy, robustness, efficiency and computational complexity.