Towards a comprehensive comparison among recent colour-difference formulae

Abstract

Since CIE defined the first standard colorimetric observer in 1931, many colour-difference formulae have been proposed. In this contribution, we compare the performance of 13 commonly-used colour-difference formulae several groups of test pairs, uniformly distributed on the CIELAB space, with just chroma variation, just hue variation, just lightness variation, and with two different sizes of colour differences: 1.0 and 5.0 CIELAB units. The differences among formulae were analized using the STRESS index, and a Multidimensional Scaling analysis was done to show the relative similarity among the formulae. Differences among colour-difference formulae were also shown using a*-b*-diagrams.