I am building an interface for light management in a home automation system. I managed to control standard on/off and dimmable light for various providers with little problem, but now I am stuck with a problem related to RGB light.
The light I am currently using is an RGBW led strip - specifically, I am working with a low-cost RGBW light: the light is composed by four led and every led can be controlled individually.
To be more clear - I am working on some c# code that should retrieve the currently selected color and display it in the UI, and enable the user to specify a new color for the light. For setting the color and retrieving it I must use a command provider that enables me to send and receive commands via a web service.
The provider works with RGBW colors - the four component for Red, Green, Blue and White are used. To represent the current light color on my interface I would like to translate the RGBW color returned by the service to a more standard RGB/HSB scheme.
Searching the web, the only reference for color conversion that I found (excluding a c++ sample for rgb to rgbw conversion that, based on my understanding, must have some severe bug) is this article that shows a conversion from HSI to RGBW, which is the inverse of what I needed: link here
I am searching for some insight about how I can achieve this conversion (or a simple explanation of why it isn't possible). As far as I get the conversion from RGB to an RGBW is arbitrary - a single RGB value can be represented as multiple RGBW values, but the opposite conversion should be univocal. Also note that while I am using c#, feel free to refer to algorithms in other language too - language isn't the problem, the problem is that I don't know the math to do the color conversion.
I have been reviewing the answer suggested by Roberto but the colors seemed dimmer and undersaturated in many cases. Taking the example of RGB = (255,255,2) leads to RGBW = (128,128,1,2).
Digging further, it seems that the paper by Chul Lee has an error in its equation for K. The equation, which comes from a paper by Lili Wang ("Trade-off between luminance and color in RGBW displays for mobile-phone usage") is actually:
K = (Wo + M)/M
Note that it is a capital M, not a lowercase m. Given this change, you also do not need Q since it scales properly by nature. Using the new K on the same RGB = (255,255,2) example leads to a much more reasonable RGBW = (255,255,0,2).
Putting it all together:
M = max(Ri,Gi,Bi)
m = min(Ri,Gi,Bi)
Wo = if (m/M < 0.5) use ( (m*M) / (M-m) ) else M
K = (Wo + M) / M
Ro = floor[ ( K * Ri ) - Wo ]
Go = floor[ ( K * Gi ) - Wo ]
Bo = floor[ ( K * Bi ) - Wo ]