Significance of Color Spaces and Their Selection for Image Processing: A Survey

The human visual system is encompassed with three components that help to produce a color sensation. The color display devices use this concept and create their full range of colors by incorporating all three primary color components. Any displayable color can be created with the help of these primaries. This paper explains the concept of color space, which helps to understand a particular device’s color proficiencies. Since colors are a more robust descriptor, color spaces are considered to play a significant role in representing an image appropriately. The performance of many algorithms depends on the selection of an appropriate color space. There are many kinds of color spaces that can be used in real-time applications. These are RGB, nRGB, HSV, TSL, YCbCr, YUV, YES, CIE-XYZ, CMYK, etc. In this paper, color spaces and their vast classification are described in brief. Apart from these, the characteristics, applicability, limitations, mathematical conversion, and other essential factors are also explained for each color space.