Testing colour-difference formulas from LMS colour spaces inspired in CIELAB

Abstract

CIELAB was recommended by CIE in 1976 as an approximately uniform colour space and colour-difference formula based on CIE XYZ tristimulus values. In the current paper, first CIELAB is improved by keeping its structure and optimizing its four parameters in XYZ, LMS and XFYFZF spaces, resulting in modifications named MLAB(XYZ), MLAB(LMS) and MLAB(XFYFZF), respectively. After this, CIELAB and these three modifications were evaluated in XYZ, LMS and XFYFZF colour spaces, respectively. From the combined and corrected (COM-corrected) visual dataset employed after CIEDE2000 development (J. Opt. Soc. Am. A. 25, 1828-1834, 2008), using the Standardized Residual Sum of Squares (CIE 217:2016), we found that CIELAB and its modifications perform similarly in XYZ and XFYFZF spaces and perform worse in the LMS colour space. It was also found that the three modifications to CIELAB perform significantly better than CIELAB in predicting the COM-corrected dataset, but significantly worse than the CIEDE2000 colour-difference formula and CAM16-UCS space. The MLAB(XFYFZF) space can therefore be tested as an approximately uniform colour space and colour-difference formula, following research proposed by CIE Technical Committee 1-98.