YCbCr

YCbCr, Y′CbCr, or Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr, also written as YC_BC_R or Y′C_BC_R, 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 C_B and C_R 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 is not an absolute color space; rather, it is a way of encoding RGB information. The actual color displayed depends on the actual RGB primaries used to display the signal. Therefore a value expressed as Y′CbCr is predictable only if standard RGB primary chromaticities are used.

Rationale

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 (C_B and C_R) that can be bandwidth-reduced, subsampled, compressed, or otherwise treated separately for improved system efficiency.

CBCR

CBCR may refer to: