Adapting to an enhanced color gamut - implications for color vision and color deficiencies.

One strategy for aiding color deficiencies is to use three narrow passbands to filter the light spectrum to increase the saturation of colors. This filtering is analogous to the narrow emission bands used in wide gamut lighting or displays. We examined how perception adapts to the greater color gamut area produced by such devices, testing color-normal observers and simulated environments. Narrowband spectra increased chromatic contrasts but also increased contrast adaptation, partially offsetting the perceived contrast enhancements. Such adaptation adjustments are important for understanding the perceptual consequences of exposure to naturally or artificially enhanced color gamut areas for both color-deficient and color-normal observers.

Diffuseness of illumination suitable for reproducing a faithful and ideal appearance of an object.

We investigated the diffuseness of illumination to examine which diffuseness condition faithfully reproduces the surface appearance of an object as seen in a natural environment. We also examined the diffuseness condition which produces the ideal appearance of the object. Observers first memorized the appearance of various objects in daily environments, and then evaluated the appearance of the objects under different diffuseness conditions. The observers reported that the moderate diffuseness condition best reproduced a faithful and ideal appearance of the objects, compared with the low and high diffuseness conditions. This indicates that a very low or high diffuseness, which is unfamiliar, is not suitable for reproducing an object's surface appearance faithfully and ideally. Our results suggest that it is possible to determine a suitable diffuseness condition for reproducing the appearance of objects.

Effect of light source distances and illuminances on the gloss perception of papers.

This study examines the human gloss perception of printing papers at various illuminances and distances from a light source to the object's surface. Gloss is evaluated based on not only the intensity of reflected light but also the sharpness of specular highlights. The apparent spread of the reflected light source image, which is also used for gloss evaluations, depends on the distance between the light source and the object's surface. Unlike physical variation of specular image properties, the perception of gloss may exhibit constancy similar to color perception. Our results reveal that illuminance has a strong effect on gloss perception. We found cases where low-gloss samples looked glossier than high-gloss ones-the gloss reversal phenomenon. These results suggest that there is a case in which gloss constancy may not work in every condition.

Influence of naturalness of chroma and lightness contrast modulation on colorfulness adaptation in natural images.

We investigated as to whether the naturalness of images modulated by a combination of chroma and lightness contrast affects the colorfulness perception. Four types of modulated images with different combinations of chroma and lightness contrast were used as adaptation stimuli. After adapting to one of the adaptation stimuli groups, observers judged the colorfulness of test images that were also modulated by the different combinations of chroma and lightness contrast. Our results showed that the combination of chroma and lightness contrast modulation affected the strength of colorfulness adaptation. The results also indicated that when adapting to images that exhibited high naturalness, the effect of colorfulness adaptation was strong. It was suggested that the naturalness of the chroma and lightness combination is an important factor for colorfulness adaptation.

Computerized simulation of color appearance for anomalous trichromats using the multispectral image: erratum.

Corrections are given for misprints in J. Opt. Soc. Am. A35, B278 (2018)JOAOD60740-323210.1364/JOSAA.35.00B278.

Computerized simulation of color appearance for anomalous trichromats using the multispectral image.

Most color simulators for color deficiencies are based on the tristimulus values and are intended to simulate the appearance of an image for dichromats. Statistics show that there are more anomalous trichromats than dichromats. Furthermore, the spectral sensitivities of anomalous cones are different from those of normal cones. Clinically, the types of color defects are characterized through Rayleigh color matching, where the observer matches a spectral yellow to a mixture of spectral red and green. The midpoints of the red/green ratios deviate from a normal trichromat. This means that any simulation based on the tristimulus values defined by a normal trichromat cannot predict the color appearance of anomalous Rayleigh matches. We propose a computerized simulation of the color appearance for anomalous trichromats using multispectral images. First, we assume that anomalous trichromats possess a protanomalous (green shifted) or deuteranomalous (red shifted) pigment instead of a normal (L or M) one. Second, we assume that the luminance will be given by L+M, and red/green and yellow/blue opponent color stimulus values are defined through L-M and (L+M)-S, respectively. Third, equal-energy white will look white for all observers. The spectral sensitivities of the luminance and the two opponent color channels are multiplied by the spectral radiance of each pixel of a multispectral image to give the luminance and opponent color stimulus values of the entire image. In the next stage of color reproduction for normal observers, the luminance and two opponent color channels are transformed into XYZ tristimulus values and then transformed into sRGB to reproduce a final image for anomalous trichromats. The proposed simulation can be used to predict the Rayleigh color matches for anomalous trichromats. We also conducted experiments to evaluate the appearance of simulated images by color deficient observers and verified the reliability of the simulation.

Color constancy influenced by unnatural spatial structure.

The recognition of spatial structures is important for color constancy because we cannot identify an object's color under different illuminations without knowing which space it is in and how that space is illuminated. To show the importance of the natural structure of environments on color constancy, we investigated the way in which color appearance was affected by unnatural viewing conditions in which a spatial structure was distorted. Observers judged the color of a test patch placed in the center of a small room illuminated by white or reddish lights, as well as two rooms illuminated by white and reddish light, respectively. In the natural viewing condition, an observer saw the room(s) through a viewing window, whereas in an unnatural viewing condition, the scene structure was scrambled by a kaleidoscope-type viewing box. Results of single room condition with one illuminant color showed little difference in color constancy between the two viewing conditions. However, it decreased in the two-rooms condition with a more complex arrangement of space and illumination. The patch's appearance under the unnatural viewing condition was more influenced by simultaneous contrast than its appearance under the natural viewing condition. It also appears that color appearance under white illumination is more stable compared to that under reddish illumination. These findings suggest that natural spatial structure plays an important role for color constancy in a complex environment.

Analysis of Gloss Unevenness and Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function in Specular Reflection.

Gloss is associated significantly with material appearance, and observers often focus on gloss unevenness. Gloss unevenness is the intensity distribution of reflected light observed within a highlight area, that is, the variability. However, it cannot be analyzed easily because it exists only within the highlight area and varies in appearance across the reflection angles. In recent years, gloss has been analyzed in terms of the intensity of specular reflection and its angular spread, or the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF). In this study, we develop an apparatus to measure gloss unevenness that can alter the angle with an angular resolution of 0.02°. Additionally, we analyze the gloss unevenness and BRDF in terms of specular reflection. Using a high angular resolution, we measure and analyze high-gloss materials, such as mirrors and plastics, and glossy materials, such as photo-like inkjet paper and coated paper. Our results show that the magnitude of gloss unevenness is the largest at angles marginally off the center of the specular reflection angle. We discuss an approach for physically defining gloss unevenness based on the BRDF.

Are Gaussian spectra a viable perceptual assumption in color appearance?

Natural illuminant and reflectance spectra can be roughly approximated by a linear model with as few as three basis functions, and this has suggested that the visual system might construct a linear representation of the spectra by estimating the weights of these functions. However, such models do not accommodate nonlinearities in color appearance, such as the Abney effect. Previously, we found that these nonlinearities are qualitatively consistent with a perceptual inference that stimulus spectra are instead roughly Gaussian, with the hue tied to the inferred centroid of the spectrum [J. Vision 6(9), 12 (2006)]. Here, we examined to what extent a Gaussian inference provides a sufficient approximation of natural color signals. Reflectance and illuminant spectra from a wide set of databases were analyzed to test how well the curves could be fit by either a simple Gaussian with three parameters (amplitude, peak wavelength, and standard deviation) versus the first three principal component analysis components of standard linear models. The resulting Gaussian fits were comparable to linear models with the same degrees of freedom, suggesting that the Gaussian model could provide a plausible perceptual assumption about stimulus spectra for a trichromatic visual system.

Effect of spatial structure on colorfulness adaptation for natural images.

We examined whether the perception of the colorfulness of an image is influenced by the adaptation of the visual system to natural and shuffled images with different degrees of saturation. In the experiment, observers first became adapted to several images with different levels of saturation and then their colorfulness perception of a test image was measured. The results show that their perception of colorfulness was influenced by their adaptation to the saturation of images. The effect was stronger following adaptation to natural images than to images consisting of a shuffled collage of randomized color blocks, which suggests that the naturalness of the spatial structure of an image affects the strength of the effect.

Contrast adaptation reveals increased organizational complexity of chromatic processing in the visual evoked potential.

Results from psychophysics and single-unit recordings suggest that color vision comprises multiple stages of processing. Postreceptoral channels appear to consist of both a stage of broadly tuned opponent channels that compare cone signals and a subsequent stage, which includes cells tuned to many different directions in color space. The chromatic visual evoked potential (crVEP) has demonstrated chromatic processing selective for cardinal axes of color space. However, crVEP evidence for higher-order color mechanisms is lacking. The present study aimed to assess the contribution of lower- and higher-order color mechanisms to the crVEP by using chromatic contrast adaptation. The results reveal the presence of mechanisms tuned to intermediate directions in color space in addition to those tuned to the fundamental cardinal axes.

Tests of a functional account of the Abney effect.

The Abney effect refers to changes in the hue of lights as they are desaturated. Normally the purity is varied by desaturating with a fixed spectrum. Mizokami et al. [J. Vis.6, 996 (2006)] instead varied purity by using Gaussian spectra and increasing their bandwidth. Under these conditions the hues of lights at short and medium wavelengths tended to remain constant and thus were tied to a fixed property of the stimulus such as the spectral peak, possibly reflecting a compensation for the spectral filtering effects of the eye. Here we test this account more completely by comparing constant hue loci across a wide range of wavelengths and between the fovea and periphery. Purity was varied by adding either a fixed spectrum or by varying the spectral bandwidth, using an Agile Light Source capable of generating arbitrary spectra. For both types of spectra, hue loci were approximated by the Gaussian model at short and medium wavelengths, though the model failed to predict the precise form of the hue changes or the differences between the fovea and periphery. Our results suggest that a Gaussian model provides a useful heuristic for predicting constant hue loci and the form of the Abney effect at short and medium wavelengths and may approximate the inferences underlying the representation of hue in the visual system.

Effect of skin colors due to hemoglobin or melanin modulation on facial expression recognition.

Facial color is thought to contribute to the perception of emotional expression. Previous studies on facial recognition have shown that reddish and bluish faces enhance the perceptions of anger and sadness, respectively. However, the effect of facial color on the recognition of facial expressions in the range of natural skin colors remains unexplored. In this study, we examined the effect of natural skin color changes on the perception of facial expressions of anger, sadness, and happiness. We used five skin color conditions for each facial expression: standard, and hemoglobin or melanin decrease/increase (H-, H+, M-, and M + ). In the experiment, we used images of different facial expressions ranging from neutral to maximum intensity. Observers judged whether a face stimulus was perceived as "angry" ("happy" or "sad") or "not angry" ("not happy" or "not sad"). The results showed that H+, M+, H-, and M- enhanced the perception of anger and happiness, respectively. However, the change in the perception of sadness due to these modulations was small. These results suggest that the range of natural facial colors by hemoglobin and melanin modulation affects facial expression recognition. We further consider the possibility that these results could be partially explained by the lightness of the stimulus.

Adaptation to natural facial categories.

Face perception is fundamentally important for judging the characteristics of individuals, such as identification of their gender, age, ethnicity or expression. We asked how the perception of these characteristics is influenced by the set of faces that observers are exposed to. Previous studies have shown that the appearance of a face can be biased strongly after viewing an altered image of the face, and have suggested that these after-effects reflect response changes in the neural mechanisms underlying object or face perception. Here we show that these adaptation effects are pronounced for natural variations in faces and for natural categorical judgements about faces. This suggests that adaptation may routinely influence face perception in normal viewing, and could have an important role in calibrating properties of face perception according to the subset of faces populating an individual's environment.

Evaluation of Material Appearance Under Different Spotlight Distributions Compared to Natural Illumination.

Solid-state lamps including Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) lighting could facilitate a wide variety of lighting conditions by controlling the spectral power distribution and the spatial distribution of the light source. The appearance of the surface of an object is significantly influenced by the lighting conditions and the constituent materials of the objects. Therefore, appearance of objects may appear to be different from expectation. Lighting condition leads to important part of accurate material recognition. We investigate whether it is possible to determine the lighting condition that results in the intended material appearance by the evaluation of this parameter under different lighting distributions compared to natural illumination. The viewing conditions of three spotlight sizes and three illuminance levels were investigated. The participants selected the viewing condition for which the appearance of fruits and vegetable food samples was the closest to the impressions learned from observing and freely holding these objects under natural reference illumination. Participants also evaluated their impressions of stimuli in each viewing condition by responding to twelve questions. The results show that the wide spotlight size condition with higher diffuseness of the illumination was selected more frequently than the narrow spotlight conditions. This suggests that the diffuseness of illumination influences the appearance of the object's material. The results of seven-point scales suggest that their impression of stimuli was influenced by the surface properties of the objects as well as the lighting distributions. It was suggested that it is possible to set an appropriate lighting condition to facilitate material appearance similar to the expected appearance under natural illumination.

Color Constancy in Two-Dimensional and Three-Dimensional Scenes: Effects of Viewing Methods and Surface Texture.

There has been debate about how and why color constancy may be better in three-dimensional (3-D) scenes than in two-dimensional (2-D) scenes. Although some studies have shown better color constancy for 3-D conditions, the role of specific cues remains unclear. In this study, we compared color constancy for a 3-D miniature room (a real scene consisting of actual objects) and 2-D still images of that room presented on a monitor using three viewing methods: binocular viewing, monocular viewing, and head movement. We found that color constancy was better for the 3-D room; however, color constancy for the 2-D image improved when the viewing method caused the scene to be perceived more like a 3-D scene. Separate measurements of the perceptual 3-D effect of each viewing method also supported these results. An additional experiment comparing a miniature room and its image with and without texture suggested that surface texture of scene objects contributes to color constancy.

Nonlinearities in color coding: compensating color appearance for the eye's spectral sensitivity.

Most wavelengths change hue when mixed with white light. These changes, known as the Abney effect, have been extensively studied to characterize nonlinearities in the neural coding of color, but their potential function remains obscure. We measured the Abney effect in a new way--by varying the bandwidth of the spectrum rather than mixing with white--and this leads to a new interpretation of the role of nonlinear responses in color appearance. Because of the eye's limited spectral sensitivity, increasing the bandwidth of a spectrum changes the relative responses in the three classes of cone receptor and thus would change hue if the percept were tied to a fixed cone ratio. However, we found that hue is largely independent of bandwidth and thus constant for a constant peak wavelength for stimuli with Gaussian spectra. This suggests that color appearance is compensated for the eye's spectral filtering, and that this compensation embodies specific perceptual inferences about how natural spectra vary. When a wavelength is instead diluted with white light--which does not bias the cone ratios--then the same compensation predicts changes in hue because the "right" response is made to the "wrong" stimulus. This model generates constant hue loci that are qualitatively consistent with measures of the Abney effect and provides a novel functional account of such effects in color appearance, in which postreceptoral responses are adjusted so that constant hue percepts are tied to consistent physical properties of the environment rather than consistent physiological properties such as the cone ratios.

Seasonal variations in the color statistics of natural images.

We examined how the distribution of colors in natural images varies as the seasons change. Images of natural outdoor scenes were acquired at locations in the Western Ghats, India, during monsoon and winter seasons and in the Sierra Nevada, USA, from spring to fall. The images were recorded with an RGB digital camera calibrated to yield estimates of the L, M, and S cone excitations and chromatic and luminance contrasts at each pixel. These were compared across time and location and were analyzed separately for regions of earth and sky. Seasonal climate changes alter both the average color in scenes and how the colors are distributed around the average. Arid periods are marked by a mean shift toward the +L pole of the L vs. M chromatic axis and a rotation in the color distributions away from the S vs. LM chromatic axis and toward an axis of bluish-yellowish variation, both primarily due to changes in vegetation. The form of the change was similar at the two locations suggesting that the color statistics of natural images undergo a characteristic pattern of temporal variation. We consider the implications of these changes for models of both visual sensitivity and color appearance.

Neural adjustments to chromatic blur.

The perception of blur in images can be strongly affected by prior adaptation to blurry images or by spatial induction from blurred surrounds. These contextual effects may play a role in calibrating visual responses for the spatial structure of luminance variations in images. We asked whether similar adjustments might also calibrate the visual system for spatial variations in color. Observers adjusted the amplitude spectra of luminance or chromatic images until they appeared correctly focused, and repeated these measurements either before or after adaptation to blurred or sharpened images or in the presence of blurred or sharpened surrounds. Prior adaptation induced large and distinct changes in perceived focus for both luminance and chromatic patterns, suggesting that luminance and chromatic mechanisms are both able to adjust to changes in the level of blur. However, judgments of focus were more variable for color, and unlike luminance there was little effect of surrounding spatial context on perceived blur. In additional measurements we explored the effects of adaptation on threshold contrast sensitivity for luminance and color. Adaptation to filtered noise with a 1/f spectrum characteristic of natural images strongly and selectively elevated thresholds at low spatial frequencies for both luminance and color, thus transforming the chromatic contrast sensitivity function from lowpass to nearly bandpass. These threshold changes were found to reflect interactions between different spatial scales that bias sensitivity against the lowest spatial grain in the image, and may reflect adaptation to different stimulus attributes than the attributes underlying judgments of image focus. Our results suggest that spatial sensitivity for variations in color can be strongly shaped by adaptation to the spatial structure of the stimulus, but point to dissociations in these visual adjustments both between luminance and color and different measures of spatial sensitivity.

Visual adjustments to temporal blur.

After observers have adapted to an edge that is spatially blurred or sharpened, a focused edge appears too sharp or blurred, respectively. These adjustments to blur may play an important role in calibrating spatial sensitivity. We examined whether similar adjustments influence the perception of temporal edges, by measuring the appearance of a step change in the luminance of a uniform field after adapting to blurred or sharpened transitions. Stimuli were square-wave alternations (at 1 to 8 Hz) filtered by changing the slope of the amplitude spectrum. A two-alternative-forced-choice task was used to adjust the slope until it appeared as a step change, or until it matched the perceived transitions in a reference stimulus. Observers could accurately set the waveform to a square wave, but only at the slower alternation rates. However, these settings were strongly biased by prior adaptation to filtered stimuli, or when the stimuli were viewed within temporally filtered surrounds. Control experiments suggest that the latter induction effects result directly from the temporal blur and are not simply a consequence of brightness induction in the fields. These results suggest that adaptation and induction adjust visual coding so that images are focused not only in space but also in time.