AccessGrid Presentation - "Colour Appearance Modelling: Predicting how we perceive colours"

Timo Kunkel, University of Bristol, 2-3pm Room 1.10, Kilburn Building, The University of Manchester

An Access Grid presentation in conjunction with vizNET and the ACM SIGGRAPH University of Manchester Professional Chapter

Colour in Computer Graphics is often assumed to be a trivial problem. Seen from a physical or photometric point of view this might be acceptable as it is possible to break down measurements of colour into physically describable elements like wavelength or energy flux. But these physical values alone cannot describe the vast amount of sensations our visual system is capable to perceive. At the moment photons hit the retina, complex processes like adaptation, compression, change of signal encoding or feedback loops are taking place starting from the photoreceptors towards the visual cortex. Understandably, describing the visual system in a model is also a complex task. Colour appearance modelling (CAM) offers a solution by describing the major processes occurring in the Human Visual System (HVS) by taking into account many factors which have been reported both by neuroscientific research as well as psychophysical studies. In this presentation we are going to talk about the use of Colour Appearance Models in Computer Graphics and adjacent fields including the current state of the art. We will discuss their applicability as well as their limitations when using them as a tool to gain a more realistic description of colour appearance.