Extract prominent colors from an image – JavaScript port of Android's Palette

github.com

10 points·fedgerIO··5 comments

I wonder how feasible it would be to run this kind of thing against frames of a running video to periodically adjust the colours of the page container playing the video, sort of like that Phillips Ambilight TV:

http://www.philips.co.uk/c-m-so/televisions/p/ambilight

Also, writing the Gulpfile in Coffeescript and having "compile the Gulpfile to JS" in the installation instructions kind of made me frown a bit...

Well, there are a lot of DIY Ambilight clones, most commonly running on Arduino, monitoring the colors of computer's screen and lighting LED strips accordingly. So it's definitely feasible. But I predict that colour changes in the page background would be a lot less pleasing and more annoying than ambient lighting changes behind the screen.

There are quite a few JS Ambilight demos out there. Here's one that works pretty well: http://media.chikuyonok.ru/ambilight/

Sam Clay's excellent NewsBlur did this in Python in order to pick good colors to represent a blog source - he gave a short talk about it in an NYC LinkedList session (which later morphed into Hacker School which then became The Recurse Center).

The idea is not really new, it is just becoming more popular thanks to Android's implementation as a first party lib. There are several well known algorithms : Octree, MCQ & Neuquant and all libs tend to implement a variation of one of these.

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