Open AccessFrequency of metamerism in natural scenes
Author(s) -
David H. Foster,
Kinjiro Amano,
Sérgio Nascimento,
Michael J. Foster
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of the optical society of america. a, optics, image science, and vision./journal of the optical society of america. a, online
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.803
H-Index - 158
eISSN - 1520-8532
pISSN - 1084-7529
DOI - 10.1364/josaa.23.002359
Subject(s) - standard illuminant , chromatic adaptation , trichromacy , mathematics , optics , chromatic scale , physics , color vision
Estimates of the frequency of metameric surfaces, which appear the same to the eye under one illuminant but different under another, were obtained from 50 hyperspectral images of natural scenes. The degree of metamerism was specified with respect to a color-difference measure after allowing for full chromatic adaptation. The relative frequency of metameric pairs of surfaces, expressed as a proportion of all pairs of surfaces in a scene, was very low. Depending on the criterion degree of metamerism, it ranged from about 10(-6) to 10(-4) for the largest illuminant change tested, which was from a daylight of correlated color temperature 25,000 K to one of 4000 K. But, given pairs of surfaces that were indistinguishable under one of these illuminants, the conditional relative frequency of metamerism was much higher, from about 10(-2) to 10(-1), sufficiently large to affect visual inferences about material identity.