Enhanced Color-to-Gray Conversion

Abstract

Important visual details are lost when a color image is converted into a luminance image using GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, or other graphic tools (see Figure 1). An enhanced conversion method is presented that creates an optimized grayscale image with visual artifacts of the standard method reduced to a minimum. The run time of the algorithm is linear in the number of pixels and allows a very simple implementation compared to other color-to-gray solutions.