The Transformation of RGB Images to Munsell Soil-Color Charts

[Objective] The transformation from RGB to Munsell color space is a relevant issue for different tasks, such as the identification of soil taxonomy, organic materials, rock materials, skin types, among others. This research aims to develop alternatives based on feedforward networks and the convolutional neural networks to predict the hue, value, and chroma in the Munsell soil-color charts (MSCCs) from RGB images. [Methodology] We used images of Munsell soil-color charts from 2000 and 2009 versions taken from Millota et al. (2018) to train and test the models. A division of 2856 images in 10% for testing, 20% for validation, and 70% for training was used to build the models. [Results] The best approach was the convolutional neural networks for classification with 93% of total accuracy of hue, value, and chroma combination; it comprises three CNN, one for the hue prediction, another for value prediction, and the last one for chroma prediction. However, the three best models show closeness between the prediction and real values according to the CIEDE2000 distance. The cases classified incorrectly with this approach had a CIEDE2000 average of 0.27 and a standard deviation of 1.06. [Conclusions] The models demonstrated better color recognition in uncontrolled environments than the Transformation of Centore, which is the classical method to transform from RGB to HVC. The results were promising, but the model should be tested with real images at different applications, such as soil real images, to classify the soil color.