We have experimentally investigated and compared the performance of various colour descriptors (i.e.: soft descriptors, percentiles, marginal histograms and 3D histogram), and colour spaces (i.e.: RGB, HSV and CIE Lab) for parquet sorting. The results show that simple and compact colour descriptors, such as the mean of each colour channel, are as accurate as more complicated features. Likewise, we found no statistically significant difference in the accuracy attainable through the colour spaces considered in the paper. Our experiments also show that most methods are fast enough for real-time processing. The results suggest the use of simple statistical descriptors along with RGB data as the best practice to approach the problem.

Source:
F. Bianconi, A. Fernández, E. González and S.A. Saetta, "Performance analysis of colour descriptors for parquet sorting", Expert Systems With Applications, 40(5):1636-1644, 2013