HSM: A New Color Space used in the Processing of Color Images

Inspired on the techniques used by painters to overlap layers of various hues of paint to create oil paintings, and also on observations of the the arrangement of Short-(S), Middle-(M), and Long-(L) wavelength-sensitive cones of the human retina for the interpretation of the colors, this paper proposes the use of the new color space called HSM to the processing of color images. To demonstrate the applicability of the HSM color space in the processing of color images, this paper proposes the pixel-based segmentation of a digital image of “human skin” or “non-skin”, the sketch of the face image and the pixel-based segmentation of the trumpet flowers tree (ype). The performance of the HSM color space in the pixel-based segmentation is compared with the HSV, YCbCr and TSL color spaces while the sketch of the face image is also compared with HSV, YCbCr and TSL colors spaces and the edge detectors of the Sobel, Prewitt, Roberts, Canny and Laplacian of Gaussian methods. The results demonstrate the potential of the proposed color space.