Yuv Color Space

Yuv colorspace is a bit unusual.

Yuv color space. Previous black and white systems used only luma y information. Ycbcr y cbcr or y pb cb pr cr also written as ycbcr or y cbcr is a family of color spaces used as a part of the color image pipeline in video and digital photography systems. Yuv color space the yuv model defines a color space in terms of one luma and two chrominance components and is similar to ypbpr and ycbcr.

Y is the luma component and c b and c r are the blue difference and red difference chroma components. Y ranges from 0 to 1 or 0 to 255 in digital formats while u and v range from 0 5 to 0 5 or 128 to 127 in signed digital form or 0 to 255 in unsigned form. The y uv color model is used in the pal composite color video excluding pal n standard.

The srgb color space standard red green blue was created jointly by hewlett packard and microsoft for use on the internet it has been endorsed by the w3c exif intel pantone corel and many other industry players it is also well accepted by open source software such as the gimp and is used in proprietary and open graphics file formats such as svg. Contrary to rgb formats red green blue yuv colors are represented with one luminance component called y equivalent to grey scale and two chrominance components called u blue projection and v red projection respectively hence the name. In the yuv format luma is only 1 3rd of the signal so reducing the amount of chroma data helps a lot.

Yuv models human perception of color more closely than the standard rgb model used in computer graphics hardware. 8 bit computer rgb also known as srgb or full scale rgb and studio video rgb or rgb with head room and toe room. This allows you to maintain picture clarity while effectively reducing the file size up to 50.

The yuv color model is used in the pal ntsc and secam composite color video standards. Yuv is actually the name of the color space that is common to all yuv pixel formats. The y component determines the brightness of the color referred to as luminance or luma while the u and v components determine the color itself the chroma.

What chroma subsampling does is reduce the amount of color information in the signal to allow more luminance data instead. We consider two rgb encoding schemes in this section. 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.