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Edwin H Land's Contributions to Colour Science
Author(s) -
McLaren Keith
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
journal of the society of dyers and colourists
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.297
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1478-4408
pISSN - 0037-9859
DOI - 10.1111/j.1478-4408.1986.tb01049.x
Subject(s) - color constancy , chromatic scale , mainstream , colour vision , phenomenon , optics , computer science , artificial intelligence , psychology , mathematics , epistemology , philosophy , physics , image (mathematics) , theology
Over the last 30 years Edwin H Land and his colleagues have been conducting studies outside the mainstream of colour vision research. Although their conclusion that spectrophotometers cannot categorise the colours of objects is undoubtably false, their studies have revealed that the remarkable phenomenon of the constancy of surface colours under highly chromatic illuminants has still not been explained, in spite of having been under investigation for almost a century. Their retinex theory is an attempt to do this; it has not yet been subjected to experiments specially designed to prove it wrong. If the theory does emerge successfully, there should be no difficulty in incorporating it into current colour vision theory, which is far from being complete. However, the impact of the retinex theory on the practice of colorimetry is unlikely to be significant.