Chromatic illumination discrimination ability reveals that human colour constancy is optimised for blue daylight illuminations

Pearce, Bradley, Crichton, Stuart, Mackiewicz, Michal ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8777-8880, Finlayson, Graham D. and Hurlbert, Anya (2014) Chromatic illumination discrimination ability reveals that human colour constancy is optimised for blue daylight illuminations. PLoS One, 9 (2). ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

The phenomenon of colour constancy in human visual perception keeps surface colours constant, despite changes in their reflected light due to changing illumination. Although colour constancy has evolved under a constrained subset of illuminations, it is unknown whether its underlying mechanisms, thought to involve multiple components from retina to cortex, are optimised for particular environmental variations. Here we demonstrate a new method for investigating colour constancy using illumination matching in real scenes which, unlike previous methods using surface matching and simulated scenes, allows testing of multiple, real illuminations. We use real scenes consisting of solid familiar or unfamiliar objects against uniform or variegated backgrounds and compare discrimination performance for typical illuminations from the daylight chromaticity locus (approximately blue-yellow) and atypical spectra from an orthogonal locus (approximately red-green, at correlated colour temperature 6700 K), all produced in real time by a 10-channel LED illuminator. We find that discrimination of illumination changes is poorer along the daylight locus than the atypical locus, and is poorest particularly for bluer illumination changes, demonstrating conversely that surface colour constancy is best for blue daylight illuminations. Illumination discrimination is also enhanced, and therefore colour constancy diminished, for uniform backgrounds, irrespective of the object type. These results are not explained by statistical properties of the scene signal changes at the retinal level. We conclude that high-level mechanisms of colour constancy are biased for the blue daylight illuminations and variegated backgrounds to which the human visual system has typically been exposed.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2014 Pearce et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Interactive Graphics and Audio Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Colour and Imaging Lab
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	30 May 2014 20:26
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2023 06:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/48541
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pone.0087989

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