A new class of chromatic filters for color image processing. Theory and applications

This paper advances a new framework for chromatic filtering of color images. The chromatic content of a color image is encoded in the CIE u'v' chromaticity coordinates whereas the achromatic content is encoded as CIE Y tristimulus value. Within the u'v' chromaticity diagram, colors are added according to the well-known center of gravity law of additive color mixtures, which is generalized here into a nonlinear filtering scheme for processing the two chromatic signals u' and v'. The achromatic channel Y can be processed with traditional filtering schemes, either linear or nonlinear, depending on the specific task at hand. The most interesting characteristics of the new filtering scheme are: 1) the elimination of color smearing effects along edges between bright and dark areas; 2) the possibility of processing chromatic components in a noniterative fashion through linear convolution operations; and 3) the consequent amenability to computationally efficient implementations with fast Fourier transform. The paper includes several examples with both synthetic and real images where the performance of the new filtering method is compared with that of other color image processing algorithms.