Expressions of Color Contrast as Equivalent Achromatic Contrast

Abstract

Designers of color displays have no simple means to relate suprathreshold color contrast to performance because few of the requisite experiments have been performed. This situation might be alleviated if there were some means to re-express color contrast in terms of an equivalent achromatic contrast, because this would make relevant the extensive literature relating the latter to performance. A pair of experiments was conducted to explore and compare the relationships between color contrast, as represented by three uniform color spaces, and achromatic contrast. The results suggest that a satisfactory transformation can be derived, although additional research will be needed to accomplish this.