Color-to-grayscale conversion to maintain discriminability

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Abstract
Monochrome devices that receive color imagery must perform a conversion from color to grayscale. The most common approach is to calculate the luminance signal from the three color signals. The problem with this approach is that the distinction between two colors of similar luminance (but different hue) is lost. This can be a significant problem when rendering colors within graphical objects such as pie charts and bar charts, which are often chosen for maximum discriminability. This paper proposes a method of converting color business graphics to grayscale in a manner that preserves discriminability. Colors are first sorted according to their original lightness values. They are then spaced equally in gray, or spaced according to their 3-D color difference from colors adjacent to them along the lightness dimension. This is most useful when maximum differentiability is desired in images containing a small number of colors, such as pie charts and bar graphs. Subjective experiments indicate that the proposed algorithms outperform standard color-to-grayscale conversions.

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