Sensations and psychological effects in color image database

The development of a system supporting querying of image databases by color content tackles a major design choice about properties of colors which are referenced within user queries. On the one hand, low-level properties directly reflect numerical features and concepts tied to the machine representation of color information. On the other hand, high-level properties address concepts such as the perceptual quality of colors and the sensations that they convey. Color-induced sensations include warmth, accordance or contrast, harmony, excitement, depression, anguish etc. In particular, paintings are an example where the message is contained more in the high-level color qualities and spatial arrangements than in the physical properties of colors. Starting from this observation, Johannes Itten (1961) introduced a formalism to analyze the use of color in art and the effects that this induces on the user's psyche. In this paper, we present a system which translates the Itten theory into a formal language that allows us to express the semantics associated with the combination of chromatic properties of color images.