Patent ID: 6934412

Claim:
A method for classifying an image as one of color and neutral, the method comprising: scanning an image to produce components of a first color space, representing transformed pixels of the scanned image; transforming components of the first color space into components of a three axes second color space; a) assigning respective values associated with the components of the second color space to a plurality of respective current pixels, wherein the current pixels values include color components; comparing the color component values to an upper and lower threshold value to determine if the color component values represent low-chroma components; replacing low-chroma components with neutral values; b) producing reduced image pixels as a function of the current pixels with said replaced low-chroma components; determining respective distances of each of the average pixel values from a neutral axis of the second three axis color space; determining a count of the distances exceeding a threshold, the threshold determined as a function of a position along the neutral axis; and c) classifying the image as one of neutral and color as a function of the said count of the distances exceeding a threshold.