MATLAB: Identifying very subtle colour change

color differencedelta eimage processingImage Processing Toolboxlab color space

I'm looking to identify a very subtle colour change in a series of time lapse photographs. The colour changes from orange to yellow over time. Is there a way to identify such a subtle change/give counts of each colour in this range in each image?
Many thanks.

Best Answer

You can convert your images to LAB color space and compute the delta E. Delta E is the industry standard way of measuring color changes. I know a lot about this since I basically do it almost every day. Of course it's best to use calibrated LAB values, not the "book formulas" in the function rgb2lab(), but you could start with that function for relative (not absolute) values - it's a start anyway. See my File Exchange for a Delta E demo.
Related Question