Color-quality control using color-difference formulas: progress and problems

Abstract

We report on some recent advances in industrial color-difference evaluation focused in three main fields: Development of reliable experimental visual datasets; proposal of new color spaces and color-difference formulas; tools to evaluate the merits of color-difference formulas. The use of fuzzy techniques to assign consistency degrees to color pairs in combined visual datasets is described. The CIE/ISO joint proposal of the CIEDE2000 color-difference formula as a standard will facilitate the communication among companies and users. The CIE recommendation of the STRESS index to assess observers’ variability and relative merits of different color-difference formulas is reported. Power functions are an efficient method to improve the performance of modern color-difference formulas. We need of advanced color-difference formulas accounting for new materials with different kind of textures and gonioapparent effects.