INFPRJ04 – Mobile development – colorFinder

The fourth project was to build our very own mobile application. We were free to choose a platform. We choose for the Android platform for the practical reason that the majority of our group already owned an Android device, which would make testing a lot easier.

After some brainstorming, we stumbled onto the idea of a Color Finder: an application that would take a photo or other image, analyze it’s most dominant colors and assemble a color-palette that would best represent the colors in the original image. The application was predominantly aimed at graphic designers. They would be able to easily be able to create new palette whenever and wherever they saw a scene with a combination of colors they found interesting. The biggest flaw in that business-model was the fact that, though some creative friends had shown interest in the application, most designers own iPhones, not Android phones. Teachers suggested the application could be geared towards a larger audience by enabling the user to use the acquired color-palette to customize his or her phone interface.

During the project I mostly focussed on the algorithm that analyzed what the relevant colors in the image were. This entailed studying what elements of an image a human being would find interesting, determining what attributes of their color set these elements apart and figuring out how to sort all colors in the image to render a relevant color-palette. I ended up building a histogram of hues which showed what hues were most predominant in the image. Then I listed the hues that cause the highest peaks. For each hue I searched for the colors in that hue that had the most saturation and brightness. This is a gross simplification of the complete algorithm, but it give an idea of how it worked. I actually found a few ways of weighing the colors that rendered different palettes, each of which worked better in different circumstances. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to implement multiple versions in the final application.

We were (again) asked to produce a video as well, this time a promotional video. This is what we came up with:

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