Color plays an important role in the design of user interfaces and has a major impact on user experience. To create aesthetic and user-friendly interfaces, it is necessary that the colors of the user interface are coherent with the images. The latter can be hard to achieve since the images are often color diverse and frequently changed by editors or authors who do not have sufficient design skills or knowledge. In order to solve this problem, we have developed a model that automatically selects and adjusts user interface colors based on the most prominent colors of the image – the colors that are most noticeable in the image. For that purpose, the model includes a new method for extracting colors from the image and a new model for creating color themes for the user interface. The model for generating color themes considers both the aesthetic (color harmony, coherence with images) and the usability (color contrast, color diversity, color strength) aspects. In addition, the model can be adjusted to fit the user's needs and demands. To test and evaluate the model, we implemented it inside a web-based application where colors were automatically selected based on the main image of the page. The evaluation of the model was conducted by the users who are mainly professional designers. According to their opinion, the model automatically selects the colors that are coherent with the image, aesthetic (attractive and harmonious), and usable (prominent, contrastive, and legible). An important observation was also that color harmony can be achieved solely by using the most prominent colors of the image (regardless of their hues), suggesting that color harmony is strongly influenced by the context of use. The presented model has high practical importance since it can be used in different applications and tools. It can be used for the automatic selection of a website color theme based on a certain image (e.g. company logo or product image) or to dynamically adjust the color of elements, according to the main image – an image that is visible at the same time as the elements.
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