HSL AND HSV:

HSL and HSV are the two most common cylindrical-coordinate representations of points in an
RGB color model. The two representations rearrange the geometry of RGB in an attempt to be
more intuitive and perceptually relevant than the cartesian (cube) representation. Developed in
the 1970s for computer graphics applications, HSL and HSV are used today in color pickers, in
image editing software, and less commonly in image analysis and computer vision.

HSL stands for hue, saturation, and lightness, and is often also called HLS. HSV stands for hue,
saturation, and value, and is also often called HSB (B for brightness). A third model, common in
computer vision applications, is HSI, for hue, saturation, and intensity. However, while typically
consistent, these definitions are not standardized, and any of these abbreviations might be used
for any of these three or several other related cylindrical models.

In each cylinder, the angle around the central vertical axis corresponds to "hue", the distance
from the axis corresponds to "saturation", and the distance along the axis corresponds to
"lightness", "value" or "brightness". Note that while "hue" in HSL and HSV refers to the same
attribute, their definitions of "saturation" differ dramatically. Because HSL and HSV are simple
transformations of device-dependent RGB models, the physical colors they define depend on the
colors of the red, green, and blue primaries of the device or of the particular RGB space, and on
the gamma correction used to represent the amounts of those primaries. Each unique RGB device
therefore has unique HSL and HSV spaces to accompany it, and numerical HSL or HSV values
describe a different color for each basis RGB space.

Both of these representations are used widely in computer graphics, and one or the other of them
is often more convenient than RGB, but both are also criticized for not adequately separating
color-making attributes, or for their lack of perceptual uniformity. Other more computationally
intensive models, such as CIELAB or CIECAM02 are said to better achieve these goals.
Color Histogram
The most commonly used method to represent color feature of an image is the color histogram.
A color histogram is a type of bar graph, where the height of each bar represents an amount of
particular color of the color space being used in the image [32]. The bars in a color histogram are
named as bins and they represent the x-axis. The number of bins depends on the number of
colors there are in an image. The number of pixels in each bin denotes y-axis, which shows how
many pixels in an image are of a particular color. The color histogram can not only easily
characterize the global and regional distribution of colors in an image, but also be invariant to
rotation about the view axis. In color histograms, quantization is a process where number of bins
is reduced by taking colors that are similar to each other and placing them in the same bin.
Quantizing reduces the space required to store the histogram information and time to compare
the histograms. Obviously, quantization reduces the information regarding the content of images;
this is the tradeoff between space, processing time, and accuracy in results [40]. Color
histograms are classified into two types, global color histogram (GCH) and local color histogram
(LCH). A GCH takes color histogram of whole image and thus represents information regarding
the whole image, without concerning color distribution of regions in the image. In the contrary,
an LCH divides an image into fixed blocks or regions, and takes the color histogram of each of
those blocks. LCH contains more information about an image, but when comparing images, it is
computationally expensive. GCH is known as a traditional method for retrieving color based
images. Since it does not include color distribution of the regions, when two GCHs are
compared, one might not always get a proper result when viewed in terms of similarity of
images.