Question

I am using a BufferedImage to hold a 10 by 10 sample of an image. With this Image I would like to find an approximate average color (as a Color object) that represents this image. Currently I have two ideas on how to implement this feature:

1. Make a scaled instance of the image into a 1 by 1 size image and find the color of the newly created image as the average color
2. Use two for loops. The inner-most is used to average each line, the secondary for-loop is used to average each line pixel by pixel.

I really like the idea of the first solution, however I am not sure how accurate it would be. The second solution would be as accurate as they come, however it seems incredibly tedious. I also believe the getColor command is processor intensive on a large scale such as this (I am performing this averaging roughly at 640 to 1920 times a second), please correct me if I am wrong. Since this method will be very CPU intensive, I would like to use a fairly efficient algorithm.

Answer 1

It depends what you mean by average. If you have half the pixels red and half the pixels blue, would the average be purple? In that case I think you can try adding all the values up and dividing it by how many pixels you have.

However, I suspect that rather than the average, you want the dominant colour?

In that case one alternative could be to discretise the colours into ‘buckets’ (say at intervals of 100, or even more sparser in the extreme case just 3, one for Red, one for Green and one for Blue), and create a histogram (a simple array with counts). You would then take the bucket which has the most count.

Be careful with idea 1. Remember that scaling often takes place by sampling. Since you have a very small image, you have already lost a lot of information. Scaling down further will probably just sample a few pixels and not really average all of them. Better check what algorithm your scaling process is using.