In this letter, a quantitative evaluation index of contrast improvement of color images for dichromats is proposed. The index is made by adding two parameters to an existing index to make evaluation results consistent with human evaluation results. The effectiveness and validity of the proposed index are verified by experiments.

For dichromats to receive the information represented in color images, it is important to study contrast improvement methods and quantitative evaluation indices of color conversion results. There is an index to evaluate the degree of contrast improvement and in this index, the contrast for dichromacy caused by the lightness component is given importance. In addition, random sampling was introduced in the computation of this index. Although the validity of the index has been shown through comparison with a subjective evaluation, it is considered that the following two points should be examined. First, should contrast for normal trichromacy caused by the lightness component also be attached importance. Second, the influence of random sampling should be examined in detail. In this paper, a new index is proposed and the above-mentioned points are examined. For the first point, the following is revealed through experiment. Consideration of the contrast for normal trichromacy caused by a lightness component that is the same as that for dichromacy may or may not result in a good outcome. The evaluation performance of the proposed index is equivalent to that of the previous index overall. It can be said that the proposed index is superior to the previous one in terms of the unity of evaluating contrast. For the second point, the computation time and the evaluation of significant digits are shown. In this paper, a sampling number such that the number of significant digits can be considered as three is used. In this case, the variation caused by random sampling is negligible compared with the range of the proposed index, whereas the computation time is about one-seventh that when the sampling is not adopted.