Average color of national flags

Intoduction

The goal of this article is to create a map of each national flag average color. All of the national flags are made from several combinations of colors with specific proportions in their design (except for the Lybian flag which consists on a green rectangle). Caution should also be taken regarding the shade of each color. The blue in the french flag is not the same blue as in the Swedish flag or the blue in the US flag for example... Computation should then be done country by country.

Process

To do so, one just need to "read" the flag from a picture file. This picture will be easily transformed into a matrix of colors (one pixel of the flag will be of one specific color). Once done, it is easy to count the proportion of each color on the flag and average it to create one unique color. You can see some examples below:

These examples show some easy cases but same type of result could be obtained for trickier flag designs.

Result

 

Once done for all the countries, a map could be drawn with the "average" color of each country's national flag.

Interpretation

I am not sure an interpretation could be of any relevance, but it appears that African flags tends to be more green-blackish compared to the rest of the world. On the other hand, South American flags have more vivid colors and north hemisphere countries tends to mostly use a mix of blue and red that results in different shades of pink/purple.