Abstract

It is a cultural commonplace deriving from Newton that the colour of an object we see in the world around us depends on the relative amounts of red light, green light, and blue light coming from that object to our eyes. For a very long time it has been known that the colour of the object when it is part of a general scene will not change markedly with those considerable changes in the relative amounts of red, green, and blue light in the illumination which characterize sunlight versus blue skylight versus grey day versus tungsten light versus fluorescent light. This contradiction was named “colour constancy.” Rather than dwelling on the explanations of colour constancy by Helmholtz and those who have followed him during the last century let us go on to show that the paradox does not really exist because it is not true that the colour of a point on an object is determined by the composition of the light coming from the object.

Keywords

Unit Area Colour Constancy Green Pepper Animal Collage Retinex Theory 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© The Wenner-Gren Center 1985

Authors and Affiliations

  • E. H. Land
    • 1
  1. 1.The Rowland Institute for Science, IncCambridgeUSA

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