Significance of incorporating chrominance information for effective color-to-grayscale image conversion

This paper provides an alternative framework for color-to-grayscale image conversion by exploiting the chrominance information present in the color image using singular value decomposition (SVD). In the proposed technique of color-to-grayscale image conversion, a weight matrix corresponds to the chrominance components is derived by reconstructing the chrominance data matrix (planes a* and b*) from the eigenvalues and eigenvectors computed using SVD. The final grayscale converted image is obtained by adding the weighted chrominance data to the luminous intensity which is kept intact for the CIEL*a*b* color space of the given color image. The effectiveness of the proposed grayscale conversion is confirmed by the comparative analysis performed on the color-to-gray benchmark dataset across 10 existing algorithms based on the standard objective measures, namely normalized cross-correlation, color contrast preservation ratio, color content fidelity ratio, E score and subjective evaluation.