Color in Computer Vision: Fundamentals and Applications

Chapter 17: Color Naming

With contributions by Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, Cordelia Schmid, Ramon Baldrich, Jakob Verbeek, and Diane Larlus

Within a computer vision context, color naming is the action of assigning linguistic color labels to pixels, regions, or objects in images. ¹Humans use color names routinely and seemingly without effort to describe the world around us. They have been primarily studied in the fields of visual psychology, anthropology, and linguistics [2]. Color names are, for example, used in the context of image retrieval. A user might query an image search engine for “red cars”. The system recognizes the color name “red”, and orders the retrieved results on “car” based on their resemblance to the human usage of “red”. Furthermore, knowledge of visual attributes can be used to assist object recognition methods. For example, for an image annotated with the text “Orange stapler on table”, knowledge of the color name orange would greatly simplify the task of discovering where (or what) the stapler is. Color names are further applicable in automatic content labeling of images, colorblind assistance, and linguistic human–computer interaction [3].

In this chapter, we first discuss the influential linguistic study on color names by Berlin and Kay [4] in Section 17.1. In their work they define the concept of basic color terms. As we will see, the basic color terms of the English language are black, blue, brown, gray, green, orange, pink, purple, red, white, and ...