IEC 61966-12-2:2014

IEC 61966-12-2 ®
Edition 1.0 2014-04
INTERNATIONAL
STANDARD
Multimedia systems and equipment – Colour measurement and management –
Part 12-2: Simple metadata format for identification of colour gamut

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IEC 61966-12-2 ®
Edition 1.0 2014-04
INTERNATIONAL
STANDARD
Multimedia systems and equipment – Colour measurement and management –

Part 12-2: Simple metadata format for identification of colour gamut

INTERNATIONAL
ELECTROTECHNICAL
COMMISSION
PRICE CODE
Q
ICS 17.180.20; 33.160 ISBN 978-2-8322-1481-7

– 2 – IEC 61966-12-2:2014 © IEC 2014
CONTENTS
FOREWORD . 3
INTRODUCTION . 5
1 Scope . 6
2 Normative references . 6
3 Terms and definitions . 6
4 Simple description of gamut. 7
5 Relationship with IEC 61966-12-1 . 9
Annex A (informative) Conversion from IEC 61966-12-2 to IEC 61966-12-1 simple

profile . 11
Annex B (informative) Example of simple metadata format and conversion to
IEC 61966-12-1 simple profile . 13
Bibliography . 17

Figure 1 – The colour gamut of additive three primary colours type display . 8
Figure 2 – IEC 61966-12-1 full/medium profile . 9
Figure 3 – IEC 61966-12-1 simple profile and IEC 61966-12-2 . 9

Table 1 – Simple metadata format for identification of colour gamut . 7
Table 2 – Differences of IEC 61966-12-1 simple profile and IEC 61966-12-2 . 10
Table B.1 – Colour gamut for IEC 61966-2-5 opRGB . 13
Table B.2 – Encoded simple metadata format . 13
Table B.3 – Conversion result to CIE-XYZ values for five colour vertices . 14
Table B.4 – Example for the header . 14
Table B.5 – Example for the header of description of gamut geometry . 14
Table B.6 – Example of definition of vertices . 15
Table B.7 – Example of encoded colour space coordinates for vertices . 15

INTERNATIONAL ELECTROTECHNICAL COMMISSION
____________
MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS AND EQUIPMENT –
COLOUR MEASUREMENT AND MANAGEMENT –

Part 12-2: Simple metadata format for identification of colour gamut

FOREWORD
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International Standard IEC 61966-12-2 has been prepared by technical area 2: Colour
measurement and management, of IEC technical committee 100: Audio, video and multimedia
systems and equipment.
The text of this standard is based on the following documents:
CDV Report on voting
100/2129/CDV 100/2276/RVC
Full information on the voting for the approval of this standard can be found in the report on
voting indicated in the above table.

– 4 – IEC 61966-12-2:2014 © IEC 2014
A list of alll parts of the IEC 61966 series, published under the general title Multimedia
systems and equipment – Colour measurement and management, can be found on the IEC
website.
This publication has been drafted in accordance with the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2.
The committee has decided that the contents of this publication will remain unchanged until
the stability date indicated on the IEC web site under "http://webstore.iec.ch" in the data
related to the specific publication. At this date, the publication will be
• reconfirmed,
• withdrawn,
• replaced by a revised edition, or
• amended.
A bilingual version of this publication may be issued at a later date.

INTRODUCTION
New technologies in capturing and displaying wide-gamut colour images enable a new market
of wide-gamut video colour content creation. Recent video standards for wide gamut colour
space encoding such as IEC 61966-2-4 (xvYCC) were developed in order to be able to
distribute content with a colour gamut that is extended with respect to classical colour gamuts
such as defined by standards ITU-R BT.601 (standard definition television) and ITU-R BT.709
(high definition television). With the increasing popularity of wide gamut and high dynamic
range contents and displays, the variety of colour gamuts of displays is expected to increase.
This issue can be an obstacle to adoption of wide-gamut video colour contents in professional
content creation since the compatibility of the contents to the employed displays, as well as
the compatibility among different displays, is not ensured. The term display includes here any
video colour reproduction equipment, such as direct view displays and projectors. Thanks to
improvements in technology, the variety of colour gamuts and colour reproduction capacities
of displays increases while the colour gamut and the colour encoding rules of existing colour
space encoding standards are fixed.
To address this issue, IEC 61966-12-1: “Metadata for identification of colour gamut (Gamut
ID)” specifies a colour gamut metadata scheme for video systems including information for
colour reproduction. This metadata can apply to video content or displays. More specifically,
improvements can be achieved if the wide-gamut colour content is created with the knowledge
of the display colour gamut as well as if the colour reproduction in the display is done with the
knowledge of the colour gamut of the pictorial content.
IEC 61966-12-1 has the capability to describe arbitrary 3D colour gamuts in a given colour
space and include the full/medium profile for professional use and the simple profile for
consumer use with easier product implementation. This approach is effective, but some
ambiguities can occur in practical use. For example, if typical CE devices are able to decode
the simple profile only, due to CPU and software limitations.
In this case, even if a sender device and a receiver device are "based on IEC 61966-12-1
standard",
a) the receiver device cannot handle the Gamut ID of incoming contents, if the sender device
sends only full or medium profile.
b) the sender device should convert a full profile to a simple one for CE-devices, if the
receiver can receive the simple profile only. But the conversion is not possible for all the
cases.
Therefore, a simple Gamut ID profile standard of this standard has been developed to
address this problem.
For published parts of this series of standards refer to the IEC website.

– 6 – IEC 61966-12-2:2014 © IEC 2014
MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS AND EQUIPMENT –
COLOUR MEASUREMENT AND MANAGEMENT –

Part 12-2: Simple metadata format for identification of colour gamut

1 Scope
This part of IEC 61966 specifies the colour gamut metadata format for video systems intended
for use in CE (Consumer Electronics) devices. The metadata specified in this part of
IEC 61966 is limited to the gamut description of additive three primary colours type displays
whose white and black points have the same chromaticity. It is fundamentally based on the
conventional VESA-EDID format.
When associat
...