A Data Driven Approach to Assess Complex Colour Profiles in Plant Tissues

The ability to quantify the colour of fruit is extremely important for a number of applied fields including plant breeding, postharvest assessment, and consumer quality assessment. Fruit and other plant organs display highly complex colour patterning. This complexity makes it challenging to compare and contrast colours in an accurate and time efficient manner. Multiple methodologies exist that attempt to digitally quantify colour in complex images but these either require a priori knowledge to assign colours to a particular bin, or fit the colours present within segment of the colour space into a single colour value using a thresholding approach. A major drawback of these methodologies is that, through the process of averaging, they tend to synthetically generate values that may not exist within the context of the original image. As such, to date there are no published methodologies that assess colour patterning using a data driven approach. In this study we present a methodology to acquire and process digital images of biological samples that contain complex colour gradients. The CIE (Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage/International Commission on Illumination) ΔE2000 formula was used to determine the perceptually unique colours (PUC) within images of fruit containing complex colour gradients. This process, on average, resulted in a 98% reduction in colour values from the number of unique colours (UC) in the original image. This data driven procedure summarised the colour data values while maintaining a linear relationship with the normalised colour complexity contained in the total image. A weighted ΔE2000 distance metric was used to generate a distance matrix and facilitated clustering of summarised colour data. Clustering showed that our data driven methodology has the ability to group these complex images into their respective binomial families while maintaining the ability to detect subtle colour differences. This methodology was also able to differentiate closely related images. We provide a high quality set of complex biological images that span the visual spectrum that can be used in future colorimetric research to benchmark colourimetric method development.