Color Detector

Identify color of pixel from an image or coordinates on the screen

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Inspiration

My manager asked me a question related to color based decision making. But at that time i was unsure if i could solve it. so I tried hard and came up with this custom activity.

What it does

  • This custom activity offers these features:

[1] Extract color from any pixel on the screen
[2] Extract colors from image datatype
[3] Extract colors from image file

  • There are two color scheme used in this activity:

[1] PrimaryColor - predefined enum consists of 12 primary colors
[2] KnownColor - Default Color enum in System.Drawing

How I built it

  • Visual studio : to build the code in C#.
  • Known color of Window forms : to identify the RBG color.
  • Euclidean distance formula : to identify the nearest color to a given RBG color.
  • Uipath Get Position activity : to get the position of the element.

Challenges I ran into

  • KnownColor type in C# includes unnecessary window form specific RBG colors which were not required. Initially I created an array of window specific colors and used it to ignore these colors from output. But it was not a neat solution. So I found a function known.IsSystemColor to achieve the same task.

  • It was difficult to find out which XY coordinate was getting selected while identifying the color from screen. So I used a Pen in System.Drawing to create an eclipse before identifying the color. It is very useful for debugging.

  • As KnownColor enum has 167 colors, so it was difficult to get the correct primary color as outcome. So I created an enum of 12 primary colors to produce correct output.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Beta version of this activity is being used in couple of projects and I have received good feedback from UiPath developer community. I am glad that it is helpful in performing color based decision making.

What I learned

  • Windows graphics : To draw objects on screen
  • Code Activity : To built custom activities for UiPath
  • Code reusability : To reuse the common code between multiple activities

What's next for Color Detector

  • Improving accuracy: As it is using distance formula to identify nearest RBG coordinate so, there are some chances that it can identify an incorrect color. Therrfore I want to improve its accuracy so that it can produce better results.

  • Adding more color based activities like adding colors on images, drawing shapes or adding watermark on images

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