Get average color of image via Javascript

Question

Not sure this is possible, but looking to write a script that would return the average hex or rgb value for an image. I know it can be done in AS

Answer 1

"Dominant Color" is tricky. What you want to do is compare the distance between each pixel and every other pixel in color space (Euclidean Distance), and then find the pixel whose color is closest to every other color. That pixel is the dominant color. The average color will usually be mud.

I wish I had MathML in here to show you Euclidean Distance. Google it.

I have accomplished the above execution in RGB color space using PHP/GD here: https://gist.github.com/cf23f8bddb307ad4abd8

This however is very computationally expensive. It will crash your system on large images, and will definitely crash your browser if you try it in the client. I have been working on refactoring my execution to: - store results in a lookup table for future use in the iteration over each pixel. - to divide large images into grids of 20px 20px for localized dominance. - to use the euclidean distance between x1y1 and x1y2 to figure out the distance between x1y1 and x1y3.

Please let me know if you make progress on this front. I would be happy to see it. I will do the same.

Canvas is definitely the best way to do this in the client. SVG is not, SVG is vector based. After I get the execution down, the next thing I want to do is get this running in the canvas (maybe with a webworker for each pixel's overall distance calculation).

Another thing to think about is that RGB is not a good color space for doing this in, because the euclidean distance between colors in RGB space is not very close to the visual distance. A better color space for doing this might be LUV, but I have not found a good library for this, or any algorythims for converting RGB to LUV.

An entirely different approach would be to sort your colors in a rainbow, and build a histogram with tolerance to account for varying shades of a color. I have not tried this, because sorting colors in a rainbow is hard, and so are color histograms. I might try this next. Again, let me know if you make any progress here.