Mechanisms of color constancy

Abstract

We develop a model of how the visual system finds the colors of objects that have unknown shapes and positions. The model relies on mechanisms of light adaptation, coupled with eye movements, to recover three descriptors of surface reflectance that are represented in the signals of an achromatic mechanism and two color-opponent mechanisms. These descriptors are transformed to yield estimates of hue, the dimension of surface color that is independent of object shape and viewing geometry.