# Calculating an HSV histogram

I have to compute an HSV histogram of a colored image. Is it same as an H-S histogram?

I have found H-S histogram computation code everywhere. What is the method to change an H-S histogram to an HSV?

• Is you end-goal a marginal histogram, that is, one histogram for each variable dimension (H, S and V respectively), or a joint histogram of all three variables at once? – rwong Jul 19 '14 at 10:03

They are not the same. HSV histogram would involve computing the frequencies in a 3D cube where the volume is (depending on the implementation) 360x255x255. Due to the memory requirements, this is often not preferred (~90MB) (This might seem pretty small nowadays, but traversing this histogram is very inefficient because one cannot benefit from random accesses over CPU cache. In other words, accessing elements of the histogram - even to fill the entire volume causes tons of cache misses). In brief, I don't recommend computing this at all.
On the other hand, HS histogram is a simple 2D joint histogram with only 255x255 values. It can be cached and used even in real-time applications safely.