The development of the CIE 2000 colour‐difference formula: CIEDE2000

Abstract A colour‐difference equation based on CIELAB is developed. It includes not only lightness, chroma, and hue weighting functions, but also an interactive term between chroma and hue differences for improving the performance for blue colours and a scaling factor for CIELAB a * scale for improving the performance for gray colours. Four reliable colour discrimination datasets based upon object colours were accumulated and combined. The equation was tested together with the other advanced CIELAB based equations using the combined dataset and each individual dataset. It outperformed CMC and CIE94 by a large margin, and predicted better than BFD and LCD. The equation has been officially adopted as the new CIE colour‐difference equation. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Col Res Appl, 26, 340–350, 2001