1. A computer implemented method to identify an unknown item presented to an optical code scanner based on the appearance of the item, the method comprising: capturing an RGB formatted digital image of the unknown item by the optical code scanner; converting the captured image from RGB format to HSV format; generating a transform from the HSV formatted image using the hue and saturation data and a weighted amount of the brightness value in the HSV formatted image; and comparing the transform to data for a plurality of transforms for known items to determine the identity of the unknown item.