YCbCr

YCbCr, Y′CbCr, or Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr, also written as YCBCR or Y'CBCR, is a family of color spaces used as a part of the color image pipeline in video and digital photography systems. Y′ is the luma component and CB and CR are the blue-difference and red-difference chroma components. Y′ (with prime) is distinguished from Y, which is luminance, meaning that light intensity is nonlinearly encoded based on gamma corrected RGB primaries. YCbCr, Y′CbCr, or Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr, also written as YCBCR or Y'CBCR, is a family of color spaces used as a part of the color image pipeline in video and digital photography systems. Y′ is the luma component and CB and CR are the blue-difference and red-difference chroma components. Y′ (with prime) is distinguished from Y, which is luminance, meaning that light intensity is nonlinearly encoded based on gamma corrected RGB primaries. Y′CbCr color spaces are defined by a mathematical coordinate transformation from an associated RGB color space. If the underlying RGB color space is absolute, the Y′CbCr color space is an absolute color space as well; conversely, if the RGB space is ill-defined, so is Y′CbCr. Cathode ray tube displays are driven by red, green, and blue voltage signals, but these RGB signals are not efficient as a representation for storage and transmission, since they have a lot of redundancy. YCbCr and Y′CbCr are a practical approximation to color processing and perceptual uniformity, where the primary colors corresponding roughly to red, green and blue are processed into perceptually meaningful information. By doing this, subsequent image/video processing, transmission and storage can do operations and introduce errors in perceptually meaningful ways. Y′CbCr is used to separate out a luma signal (Y′) that can be stored with high resolution or transmitted at high bandwidth, and two chroma components (CB and CR) that can be bandwidth-reduced, subsampled, compressed, or otherwise treated separately for improved system efficiency. One practical example would be decreasing the bandwidth or resolution allocated to 'color' compared to 'black and white', since humans are more sensitive to the black-and-white information (see image example to the right). This is called chroma subsampling. YCbCr is sometimes abbreviated to YCC. Y′CbCr is often called YPbPr when used for analog component video, although the term Y′CbCr is commonly used for both systems, with or without the prime. Y′CbCr is often confused with the YUV color space, and typically the terms YCbCr and YUV are used interchangeably, leading to some confusion. The main difference is that YUV is analog and YCbCr is digital. Y′CbCr signals (prior to scaling and offsets to place the signals into digital form) are called YPbPr, and are created from the corresponding gamma-adjusted RGB (red, green and blue) source using three defined constants KR, KG, and KB as follows: where KR, KG, and KB are ordinarily derived from the definition of the corresponding RGB space, and required to satisfy K R + K G + K B = 1 {displaystyle K_{R}+K_{G}+K_{B}=1} . (The equivalent matrix manipulation is often referred to as the 'color matrix'.)