Development and evaluation of perceptually adapted color gradients for color edge detection

Although several color edge detectors have been proposed, most of them utilized Euclidean color distances in different color spaces to measure color differences. In this paper a set of color gradients based on color visual perception is proposed. These color gradients are designed in uniform color spaces and use perceptual color difference equations. In order to be able to study the gradients performance, they have been applied in a variational level set formulation. A comparative study has been performed. A set of synthetic images, generated for this purpose, has allowed carrying out an extensive evaluation. Both quantitative and qualitative measures are used. It can be conclude that detectors based on CIE94 color difference equation are the best regarding to the correlation with color visual perception. Our main contributions are: the derivation of perceptual color gradients, the design of a perceptual evaluation with a specific synthetic dataset and the comparison between detectors based on different color differences.