YUV vs RGB – Choosing a Color Space for Human-Machine Interaction

Abstract—This paper describes and compares two color spaces – YUV and RGB, taking into account possible human-computer interaction applications. Human perception-oriented properties are compared, including not only file size or bandwidth, but also subjective visibility of artifacts. 1700 tests on a group of 170 people were performed to describe the subjective quality of compressed YUV and RGB images. The paper shows that the use of the YUV color space for a machine vision implementation can give better subjective image quality than the RGB color space. The authors conclude that YUV is better for machine vision implementations than RGB due to the perceptual similarities to the human vision