Color Palette Generation From Digital Images: A Review

Color palette is a critical component of art, design, and lots of applications, providing the basis for organizing and utilizing colors to achieve specific objectives. However, generating color palettes from digital images presents unique challenges due to the complexity of colors in images. This review comprehensively investigates various techniques for generating color palettes from digital images and provides a thorough classification and discussion of these techniques from multiple perspectives. A color space must be selected to generate a color palette, and a generation method must be employed. This paper offers a concise overview of color spaces, an introduction to current palette generation methods, and an analysis of the metrics used to evaluate color differences between palettes. The review encompasses traditional manual methods and computer-aided automation methods, further categorized as histogram-based, clustering-based, and neural network-based methods. Discussion on the strengths, weaknesses, and applicability of existing methods are presented, and also opportunities for future research to enhance color palette generation from digital images are identified.