RGB space isn't the best choice for measuring the distance between two colours, since it ignores, for example, the fact that we count both dark green and light green as "green" (the RGB distance between #000000 and #7f7f7f is the same as the distance between #000000 and #5443c0 - a slightly darkened SlateBlue).
A better choice of colour space that conforms better to how colours are perceived is the so-called Lab space, which measures colours according to how light/dark, red/green, and yellow/blue they are. (There are still better models, but they come at the expense of increased computation.)
<?php
function warp1($c)
{
if($c > 10.3148)
{
return pow((561 + 40*$c)/10761, 2.4);
}
else
{
return $c / 3294.6;
}
}
function warp2($c)
{
if($c > 0.008856)
{
return pow($c, 1/3);
}
else
{
return 7.787 * $c + 4/29;
}
}
function rgb2lab($rgb)
{
[$red, $green, $blue] = array_map('warp1', $rgb);
$x = warp2($red * 0.4339 + $green * 0.3762 + $blue * 0.1899);
$y = warp2($red * 0.2126 + $green * 0.7152 + $blue * 0.0722);
$z = warp2($red * 0.0178 + $green * 0.1098 + $blue * 0.8730);
$l = 116*$y - 16;
$a = 500 * ($x - $y);
$b = 200 * ($y - $z);
return array_map('intval', [$l, $a, $b]);
}
function generate_palette_from_image($image)
{
$pal = [];
$width = imagesx($image);
$height = imagesy($image);
for($x = 0; $x < $width; ++$x)
{
for($y = 0; $y < $height; ++$y)
{
$pal[] = imagecolorat($image, $x, $y);
}
}
return array_map(function($col)use($image)
{
$rgba = imagecolorsforindex($image, $col);
return [$rgba['red'], $rgba['green'], $rgba['blue']];
}, array_unique($pal));
}
function closest_rgb_in_palette($rgb, $palette)
{
if(($idx = array_search($rgb, $palette)) !== false)
{
return $idx;
}
[$tl, $ta, $tb] = rgb2lab($rgb);
$dists = array_map(function($plab)use($tl, $ta, $tb)
{
[$pl, $pa, $pb] = $plab;
$dl = $pl - $tl;
$da = $pa - $ta;
$db = $pa - $tb;
return $dl * $dl + $da * $da + $db * $db;
}, array_map('rgb2lab', $palette));
return array_search(min($dists), $dists);
}
function closest_rgb_in_image($rgb, $image)
{
$palette = generate_palette_from_image($image);
return $palette[closest_rgb_in_palette($rgb, $palette)];
}
$lena = imagecreatefrompng('lena.png');
$red = closest_rgb_in_image([255,0,0],$lena);
echo join(' ', $red); ?>
If you're going to be matching a lot of colours to a palette, you may want to precompute and reuse the Lab palette, instead of generating it fresh each time as done here.