Techniques for digital image analysis tasks which take account of colour as well as intensity can provide more information about the image contents. The approach presented here for constructing such techniques is to define a measure expressing the “colour importance” at each pixel position in the image, to act as a weighting factor within the calculation. Results of image analysis tasks which are closer to human appraisal of the scene can be obtained using this approach.
Anthony Maeder, Binh Pham, "A Colour Importance Measure for Colour Image Analysis" in Proc. IS&T 1st Color and Imaging Conf., 1993, pp 232 - 237, https://doi.org/10.2352/CIC.1993.1.1.art00056