Detecting Boundaries between Different Color Regions in Color Codes

Compared to the bar code which is being widely used for commercial products management, color code is advantageous in both the outlook and the number of combinations. And the color code has application areas complement to the RFID's. However, due to the severe distortion of the color component values, which is easily over $50{\%}$ of the scale, color codes have difficulty in finding applications in the industry. To improve the accuracy of recognition of color codes, it'd better to statistically process an entire color region and then determine its color than to process some samples selected from the region. For this purpose, we suggest a technique to detect edges between color regions in this paper, which is indispensable for an accurate segmentation of color regions. We first transformed RGB color image to HSI and YIQ color models, and then extracted I- and Y-components from them, respectively. Then we performed Canny edge detection on each component image. Each edge image usually had some edges missing. However, since the resulting edge images were complementary, we could obtain an optimal edge image by combining them.