Patent ID: 7606412

Claim:
A method for generating user preference data regarding a color characteristic of a reference image, wherein a preference image comprises the reference image converted to have a color characteristic that a user prefers, and a preference value comprises a color characteristic value of the preference image and a reference value comprises a color characteristic value of the reference image, the method comprising: (a) generating a characteristic value pair, wherein the characteristic value pair includes preference value data and reference value data, which corresponds to a pair of the preference value and the reference value; and (b) generating preference meta-data having at least one feature block for the characteristic value pair, wherein the feature block comprises: a block header including a feature identifier corresponding to information identifying a color characteristic and a Bin number indicating a quantization level of the characteristic value, the color characteristic being at least one of color temperature, brightness, contrast, and saturation, wherein when the color characteristic includes contrast, a contrast value is determined as a standard deviation of luminance values of all pixels in the image to be displayed; and at least one feature descriptor including the preference value and the reference value as values of the identified color characteristic for the preference image and the reference image, respectively, wherein said method is carried by a computer.