Significance of contrast and structure features for an improved color image classification system

In general, the three main modules of color image classification systems are: color-to-grayscale image conversion, feature extraction and classification. The color-to-grayscale image conversion is the important pre-processing step which must incorporate the significant and discriminative contrast and structure information in the converted grayscale images as in the original color image. All the existing techniques for color-to-grayscale image conversion preserves the significant contrast and structure information in the converted grayscale images in different manners. Hence, the present work is to analyze the significant and discriminative contrast and structure information preserved in the converted grayscale images using two different decolorization techniques called rgb2gray and singular value decomposition based color-to-grayscale image conversion (SVD) applied in the color image classification systems using the three different proposed features. The three different features for color image classification systems are proposed based on the combination of the existing dense SIFT features and the contrast & structure content computed using color-to-gray structure similarity index (C2G-SSIM) metric.