Xerox Scientist Creates ‘Color Language’ Making Color Matching as Easy as Describing a Color

Xerox Scientist Creates ‘Color Language’ Making Color Matching as Easy as Describing a Color

Anyone familiar with a box of crayons can describe the color “carnation pink” but how many people can make that color appear “correctly” on a document or on a computer display? Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) scientists are developing a new technology to make adjusting colors in a document as easy as simply describing the color. Users can type “make the sky a deeper blue” or give a voice command “make the background carnation pink” and the software does the work.

The invention, still in the research stage, creates “color language” by translating human descriptions of color into the precise numerical codes that machines use to print color documents. “Today, especially in the office environment, there are many non-experts who know how they would like color to appear but have no idea how to manipulate the color to get what they want,” said Geoffrey Woolfe, principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group.

“You shouldn’t have to be a color expert to make the sky a deeper blue or add a bit of yellow to a sunset.” Yesterday, at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC), Woolfe described his work in a paper called “Natural Language Color Editing.” Xerox has filed for patents on the technology.

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