Study of chromatic adaptation using memory color matches, Part I: neutral illuminants

Abstract

In a previous paper, 12 corresponding color data sets were derived for 4 neutral illuminants using the long-term memory colours of five familiar objects. The data were used to test several linear (one-step and two-step von Kries, RLAB) and nonlinear (Hunt and Nayatani) chromatic adaptation transforms (CAT). This paper extends that study to a total of 156 corresponding color sets by including 9 more colored illuminants: 2 with low and 2 with high correlated color temperatures as well as 5 representing high chroma adaptive conditions. As in the previous study, a two-step von Kries transform whereby the degree of adaptation D is optimized to minimize the DEu'v' prediction errors outperformed all other tested models for both memory color and literature corresponding color sets, whereby prediction errors were lower for the memory color set. Most of the transforms tested, except the two- and one-step von Kries models with optimized D, showed large errors for corresponding color subsets that contained non-neutral adaptive conditions as all of them tended to overestimate the effective degree of adaptation in this study. An analysis of the impact of the sensor space primaries in which the adaptation is performed was found to have little impact compared to that of model choice. Finally, the effective degree of adaptation for the 13 illumination conditions (4 neutral + 9 colored) was successfully modelled using a bivariate Gaussian in a Macleod-Boyton like chromaticity diagram.