Relative significance of the terms in the CIEDE2000 and CIE94 color-difference formulas

CIELAB-based color-difference formulas are used to improve the prediction of visually perceived color differences through the introduction of various corrections to CIELAB. In our study we analyze the relative importance of these corrections. From the combined dataset employed for the development of CIEDE2000, we found that the improvement of CIE94 over CIELAB was considerably greater than that of CIEDE2000 over CIE94. Chroma-difference correction was the most important correction in both CIE94 and CIEDE2000. With an arbitrary value of 100 assigned to this correction, the score of the hue-difference correction in CIE94 was 21, and the scores of the four remaining corrections in CIEDE2000 were as follows: hue difference, 29; rotation term, 8; lightness difference, 8; and gray correction, 6. At 95% confidence level each of the corrections introduced in CIEDE2000 or CIE94 was statistically significant for the whole combined dataset, in agreement with the results reported by CIE TC 1-47 and 1-29. For the combined dataset, the differences between CMC and CIEDE2000 were found to be statistically significant at 95% confidence level, but the differences between CMC and CIE94 were not. From subsets of the combined dataset it was concluded that further analyses of the lightness-difference and gray corrections proposed by CIEDE2000 would be desirable, using new experimental data.