Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!bbn!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau
From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: References sought on finding "closest match" to a color
Message-ID: <11076@jade.BBN.COM>
Date: 22 May 88 21:43:18 GMT
Reply-To: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau)
Organization: BBN Laboratories Incorporated, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 20

I'm looking for references to techniques that do a resonable at finding
the "closest" match to a desired color, given a pool of candidate colors
from which to select.  

More specifically, given a target RGB value and an arbitrary sized colormap 
consisting of RGB triplets over which you have no control, how do you go
about choosing the nearest available color?

There are a couple of obvious techniques.  For example, you could consider 
RGB as defining axes in 3-space and try to minimize the spatial distance 
between the color you want and the colors you have -- looking at the code, 
X11R2 seems to do this.  

I suspect there are better techniques available.  Can someone out there
save me some research time, or is it time to head back to the reference
books?
--
 Matt Landau		    	mlandau@bbn.com
 
 Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.