White appearance of a tablet display under different ambient lighting conditions

In comparison to the great efforts made on the enhancement of image quality for tablet displays, little attention has been paid on the concept of white point. Given the increasing popularity of the light sources with chromaticities off the Planckian locus and color-tunable LED lighting, it is important to investigate human's white perception of tablet display under different ambient lighting conditions. This study investigated the white appearance of a tablet display under 17 ambient lighting conditions, including a dark condition, seven conditions with chromaticities on the Planckian locus, and nine conditions with chromaticities off the Planckian locus, (i.e., D_uv = + 0.02, -0.02, and -0.04). It was found that both the white appearance boundary defined by the fitted one-standard-deviation error ellipse and the whitest stimulus rated by the observers or identified by the bivariate Gaussian distribution were different under the various ambient lighting conditions. The optimization based on the whitest stimulus under each ambient lighting condition suggested a lower degree of chromatic adaptation under the conditions with a lower Correlated Color Temperature (CCT). For the conditions with a same CCT, a D_uv of -0.02 was found to provide a higher degree of chromatic adaptation than D_uv values of + 0.02 and -0.04.