Comparing Pixel Values

Better colour-spaces exist for this kind of business. In particular, I'd recommend YCC. A weighted Euclidean distance-function in this space would give far better results than anything linear in RGB or even HSL.

The most important coordinate is luma. I couldn't say anything certain about the two chroma components, but I suspect the red is more significant than blue (at middling intensities). IIRC, the the eye is far more sensitive to intensities in the blue hue at very low exposure, green at typical-to-high exposure, with red being fairly constant. I don't really know how or if this translates to hue-sensitivity. I'm sure Google knows a lot more, but you'll probably want to take that into consideration if working in HDR. Otherwise you may have success with something along the lines of:

float3 ycc1 = RGBToYCrCb(rgb1);float3 ycc2 = RGBToYCrCb(rgb3);float3 ycc_dist = abs(ycc1 - ycc2);const float3 WEIGHTS = float3(0.814, 0.453, 0.362);float perceived_distance = dot(ycc_dist, WEIGHTS);

Understand that the weights there came entirely off the top of my head (I normalised 9:5:4), and that better values have almost certainly been researched, if you know where to look. The implementation of the RGB-YCC conversion is linear (a matrix multiplication); details here.

The correct weights how the human eye percepts colors is

R = 0.3
G = 0.59
B = 0.11

Quote:

Original post by FoxHunter2 The correct weights how the human eye percepts colors is R = 0.3 G = 0.59 B = 0.11

Where did you get this from? It look suspiciously similar to the intensity weightings of the perceived RGB luminosities, which is a totally different thing.

Quote:

Original post by TheAdmiral Where did you get this from? It look suspiciously similar to the intensity weightings of the perceived RGB luminosities, which is a totally different thing.

Well yes, I was actually talking about luminosities, as described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayscale

Sorry if that caused any confusion.

Quote:

Original post by TheAdmiral Better colour-spaces exist for this kind of business. In particular, I'd recommend YCC. A weighted Euclidean distance-function in this space would give far better results than anything linear in RGB or even HSL. The most important coordinate is luma. I couldn't say anything certain about the two chroma components, but I suspect the red is more significant than blue (at middling intensities). IIRC, the the eye is far more sensitive to intensities in the blue hue at very low exposure, green at typical-to-high exposure, with red being fairly constant. I don't really know how or if this translates to hue-sensitivity. I'm sure Google knows a lot more, but you'll probably want to take that into consideration if working in HDR. Otherwise you may have success with something along the lines of: float3 ycc1 = RGBToYCrCb(rgb1);float3 ycc2 = RGBToYCrCb(rgb3);float3 ycc_dist = abs(ycc1 - ycc2);const float3 WEIGHTS = float3(0.814, 0.453, 0.362);float perceived_distance = dot(ycc_dist, WEIGHTS); Understand that the weights there came entirely off the top of my head (I normalised 9:5:4), and that better values have almost certainly been researched, if you know where to look. The implementation of the RGB-YCC conversion is linear (a matrix multiplication); details here.

Thank you.

Which method and color-space would be most effective for comparing gray-scale colors?

Quote:

Original post by Dansas Which method and color-space would be most effective for comparing gray-scale colors?

Well, the same algorithm would be used, but you could take the obvious short-cut that the luma is equal to any of the RGB components, and both chromas are zero. So...

float distance = abs(col1.r - col2.r);

This will give you the true lightness/luminosity distance. If you are looking for a subjective measure, perhaps of perceived luminance or intensity then you'll need to work a bit harder and have access to a lot more information, such as the display type, gamma ramps and so forth. Such accuracy will not carry from one computer to another, so it's not really viable for gaming.