Partial hue-matching

It is widely believed that color can be decomposed into a small number of component colors. Particularly, each hue can be described as a combination of a restricted set of component hues. Methods, such as color naming and hue scaling, aim at describing color in terms of the relative amount of the component hues. However, there is no consensus on the nomenclature of component hues. Moreover, the very notion of hue (not to mention component hue) is usually defined verbally rather than perceptually. In this paper, we make an attempt to operationalize such a fundamental attribute of color as hue without the use of verbal terms. Specifically, we put forth a new method--partial hue-matching--that is based on judgments of whether two colors have some hue in common. It allows a set of component hues to be established objectively, without resorting to verbal definitions. Specifically, the largest sets of color stimuli, all of which partially match each other (referred to as chromaticity classes), can be derived from the observer's partial hue-matches. A chromaticity class proves to consist of all color stimuli that contain a particular component hue. Thus, the chromaticity classes fully define the set of component hues. Using samples of Munsell papers, a few experiments on partial hue-matching were carried out with twelve inexperienced normal trichromatic observers. The results reinforce the classical notion of four component hues (yellow, blue, red, and green). Black and white (but not gray) were also found to be component colors.