A Large-Scale Multi-Lingual Color Thesaurus

We present a color thesaurus with over 9000 color names in ten different languages. Instead of using conventional psychophysical experiments, we use a statistical framework that is based on search results from Google Image Search. For each color name we compute a significance distribution in CIELAB space whose maximum indicates the location of the color name in CIELAB. A first analysis discusses the quality of the estimations in the context of human language. Further, we conduct an advanced analysis supporting our choice to use a statistical method. Finally, we demonstrate that a color name mainly depends on the chromatic values and varies more along the lightness axis.