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Reflectance, illumination, and appearance in color constancy
John J McCann1, Carinna Parraman2, Alessandro Rizzi3
1McCann Imaging Arlington, MA, USA.
Frontiers in Psychology
|January 31, 2014
Summary
Color constancy is imperfect in 3-D scenes. Object shape and illumination structure significantly alter perceived color, deviating from predictions for flat surfaces. This study quantifies these appearance shifts.
Area of Science:
- Visual Perception
- Color Science
- Computational Neuroscience
Background:
- Color constancy aims to explain stable color perception under varying illumination.
- Traditional studies often use flat Mondrian displays, which simplify real-world visual complexity.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate color constancy in three-dimensional (3-D) scenes with complex illumination.
- To quantify deviations from perfect color constancy caused by 3-D structure and nonuniform lighting.
Main Methods:
- Utilized identical 3-D Color Mondrian displays with wooden blocks under uniform and nonuniform illumination.
- Employed magnitude estimation by observers and watercolor painting to quantify color appearance and surface reflectance correlation.
- Measured changes in lightness, hue, and chroma of constant paints.
Main Results:
- Color constancy generalizations for flat Mondrians do not fully apply to 3-D displays.
- Constant paints exhibited significant shifts in lightness, hue, and chroma under nonuniform illumination.
- Object structure and illumination spatial information critically influence color appearance.
Conclusions:
- Perceived color is dependent on the spatial information of both illumination and object reflectance.
- Models of human visual appearance must account for departures from perfect color constancy observed in 3-D environments.
- Provides a dataset of color appearance measurements for computational modeling.
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