Image Processing Toolbox

YCbCr Color Space

The YCbCr color space is widely used for digital video. In this format, luminance information is stored as a single component (Y), and chrominance information is stored as two color-difference components (Cb and Cr). Cb represents the difference between the blue component and a reference value. Cr represents the difference between the red component and a reference value.

YCbCr data can be double precision, but the color space is particularly well suited to uint8 data. For uint8 images, the data range for Y is [16, 235], and the range for Cb and Cr is [16, 240]. YCbCr leaves room at the top and bottom of the full uint8 range so that additional (nonimage) information can be included in a video stream.

The function rgb2ycbcr converts colormaps or RGB images to the YCbCr color space. ycbcr2rgb performs the reverse operation.

For example, these commands convert the flowers image to YCbCr format.

• RGB = imread('flowers.tif');
  YCBCR = rgb2ycbcr(RGB);
  

NTSC Color Space

HSV Color Space