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Color Constancy and Contextual Effects on Color Appearance

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Book cover Human Color Vision

Part of the book series: Springer Series in Vision Research ((SSVR,volume 5))

Abstract

Color is a useful cue to object properties such as object identity and state (e.g., edibility), and color information supports important communicative functions. Although the perceived color of objects is related to their physical surface properties, this relationship is not straightforward. The ambiguity in perceived color arises because the light entering the eyes contains information about both surface reflectance and prevailing illumination. The challenge of color constancy is to estimate surface reflectance from this mixed signal. In addition to illumination, the spatial context of an object may also affect its color appearance. In this chapter, we discuss how viewing context affects color percepts. We highlight some important results from previous research, and move on to discuss what could help us make further progress in the field. Some promising avenues for future research include using individual differences to help in theory development, and integrating more naturalistic scenes and tasks along with model comparison into color constancy and color appearance research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Colorimetric specification of a light stimulus is often made in terms of tristimulus values, which are the intensity values of three reference lights needed to match the test light. Different systems, such as the [R,G,B] and [X,Y,Z] of the Commission Internationale de L’éclairage (CIE) are based on different choices of the three reference lights, but they are essentially equivalent: different tristimulus values are related to each other by a linear transform. The tristimulus vector of a light is often just referred to as its “color,” but this is potentially misleading, since the perceived color depends on context as well (see [89] for a good introduction to color measurement)

  2. 2.

    So called because they cannot be divided further into component hues; see Chap. 5.

  3. 3.

    Perception experiments typically involve long sessions with a large number of stimuli presented to each observer, which poses a challenge to recruiting large samples of naive observers.

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Acknowledgments

V.E. was supported by a grant from the Methusalem program by the Flemish Government (METH/08/02 and METH/14/02), awarded to Johan Wagemans. M.O. received support through the Academy Research Fellow program of the Academy of Finland.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Science Laboratories, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK

    Maria Olkkonen M.A. (Psych), Dr. rer. nat.

  2. Institute of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki, Siltavuorenpenger 1A, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Maria Olkkonen M.A. (Psych), Dr. rer. nat.

  3. Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Tiensestraat 102, box 3711, Leuven, 3000, Belgium

    Vebjørn Ekroll Dipl.-Psych., Dr. habil.

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  1. Maria Olkkonen M.A. (Psych), Dr. rer. nat.
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  2. Vebjørn Ekroll Dipl.-Psych., Dr. habil.
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Correspondence to Maria Olkkonen M.A. (Psych), Dr. rer. nat. .

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  1. University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Jan Kremers

  2. Department of Optometry and Visual Science, University College of Southeast Norway, Kongsberg, Norway

    Rigmor C. Baraas

  3. Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    N. Justin Marshall

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Olkkonen, M., Ekroll, V. (2016). Color Constancy and Contextual Effects on Color Appearance. In: Kremers, J., Baraas, R., Marshall, N. (eds) Human Color Vision. Springer Series in Vision Research, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44978-4_6

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