TESTING THE PERFORMANCE FOR UNRELATED COLOUR APPEARANCE MODELS

Most colour appearance models (CAMs) have been developed to predict the colour appearance only for related colours in different viewing conditions. More recently, CAMs to predict for unrelated colours have been proposed due to the availability of the experimental data. This paper investigates the performance of the three promising colour appearance models for unrelated colours, i.e. CAM15u, CAMFu and CAM20u using an experimental dataset carefully accumulated by Fu et al. in term of CV values. The results showed that the latest CAM20u outperformed the other models. CAMFu, as the oldest model, whose performance was much worse than other two models in predicting brightness and colourfulness, and performed well in predicting hue composition, while CAM15u gave a moderate performance in predicting brightness and colourfulness, but performed slightest worse than the others for hue composition.

A Comparison of Two Different Light Booths for Measuring Color Difference of Metameric Pairs

A standardized source of light is essential for visual color assessments, which is why lighting booths were developed. For the best results in visual assessment, it is important to consider the right choice of light source, the right viewing conditions, and the variability of the viewer. To date, many light booth technologies have been introduced to meet user demands. Since most of the light sources on the market are characterized by the designer or manufacturer, the resulting variations from booth-to-booth remain. In this study, we compared the performance of two standard light booths to assess the color difference of eleven metameric pairs. In this study, we checked an earlier technology-based light booth that is still used in the textile industry and contains illuminant A (Tungsten lamp) with CCT 2700 K, TL84 (tri-band fluorescent tube) with CCT 4000 K, and simulator D65 (CCT 6500 K) with a different light booth whose original light sources have been replaced by currently available LED retro kits from equivalent CCTs. As an inexperienced customer or industrial user, our question was, how important is this replacement? The results revealed that two different standard lighting technologies with similar CCTs cannot reproduce the same estimates because the light sources produced different SPDs. It is illustrating that caution is necessary when comparing results obtained from two different light booths containing light sources with similar CCTs but different SPDs. This comparative study suggested that the variability of the light sources’ SPDs or the observer or the sample should be modeled considering light booth’s technology to estimate its contribution to the overall variability. The close relationship between perceived and CAM02-UCS suggests that if both booths are used after the light sources have been calibrated, a formula based on color appearance models must be used to predict color appearance. To obtain better agreement between perceived and calculated color difference, one must need to avoid light booths with nominally white light sources.

A Digital Test Chart for Visual Assessment of Color Appearance Scales

A digital color appearance test chart, akin to a ColorChecker® Chart for human perception, was developed and evaluated both perceptually and computationally. The chart allows an observer to adjust the appearance of a limited number of color patches to allow a quick evaluation of perceived brightness, colorfulness, lightness, saturation, and hue on a display. The resulting data can then be used to compared observed results with the predictions of various color appearance models. Analyses in this paper highlight some known shortcomings of CIELAB, CIECAM02, and CAM16. Differences between CIECAM02 and CAM16 are also highlighted. This paper does not provide new psychophysical data for model testing, it simply describes a technique to generate such data and a computational comparison of models.

Testing Colour Appearance Model Based UCS Using HDR, WCG and COMBVD Datasets

Two colour appearance models based UCSs, CAM16-UCS and ZCAM-QMh, were tested using HDR, WCG and COMBVD datasets. As a comparison, two widely used UCSs, CIELAB and ICTCP, were tested. Metrics of the STRESS and correlation coefficient between predicted colour differences and visual differences, together with local and global uniformity based on their chromatic discrimination ellipses, were applied to test models' performance. The two UCSs give similar performance. The luminance parametric factor kL, and power factor γ, were introduced to optimize colour-difference models. Factors kL and γ of 0.75 and 0.5, gave marked improvement to predict the HDR dataset. Factor kL of 0.3 gave significant improvement in the test of WCG dataset. In the test of COMBVD dataset, optimization provide very limited improvement.

G0 Revisited as Equally Bright Reference Boundary

Brilliance and zero grayness (denoted as G0) and are two terms coined by Ralph Evans. Nayatani, Heckaman and Fairchild have done series of work to incorporate them into comprehensive color appearance models. In this work, those concepts were reexamined to scale lightness/brightness across the chromaticity diagram. Specifically, observers, mostly with a color science background, were asked to adjust the luminance of a color patch to appear with no grayness, or equivalently just about/cease to glow. The hypothesis was that lightness can be equalized across those chromaticities and the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect is automatically incorporated. This hypothesis was verified in a follow-up experiment where another group of observers completed paired comparisons of the brightness between the collected G0 results. The G0 task was also repeated under another two levels of adaption backgrounds, based on which different absolute brightness results for a given chromaticity might be derived. In addition, high correlations between the G0 results (as a perceptual boundary between appearance modes) and different physical gamut boundaries including MacAdam's optimal colors were found for possible computational proxies and ecologically meaningful implications.

The threshold of color inconstancy

Color inconstancy refers to significant changes in the perceived color of an object across two or more different lighting conditions, such as daylight and incandescent light. This research focusses on defining the threshold of color inconstancy between generated D65 and A illumination through a psychophysical experiment. Although modern color appearance models provide equations to calculate the degree of adaptation, a neutral grey match experiment was completed to produce a more accurate D values for the experimental viewing conditions. Like setting an instrumental color tolerance experiment, a second, sorting, experiment was used to define the threshold of color inconstancy. This threshold is the color shift, expressed in color difference terms, required for observers to notice a color change across changes in illumination. In addition, the tolerance ellipsoid for each Munsell principal hue group was also established.