8

Human Color Perception

ROBERT M. BOYNTON

Definition of Color
Common sense would suggest that the word color refers to the special quality that
color photography, television, or printing adds to black-and-white, or colorless,
versions of the same scene. However, in a technical sense the word "color" is also
used to refer to variations in lightness, implying that color exists also in black-
and-white reproductions. Wyszecki and Stiles's (1982) Color Science (a massive,
authoritative handbook concerned mainly with the physical basis of color vision)
offers the following definition (p. 487):
Color is the aspect of visual perception by which an observer may distinguish differences
between two structure-free fields of view of the same size and shape, such as may be
caused by differences in the spectral composition of the radiant energy concerned in the
observation. [italics mine]
It is convenient to distinguish between two aspects of color. The first, chro-
matic color, is what color reproduction adds to black-and-white. The second
aspect bears the seemingly oxymoronic label achromatic color. Let us examine
the difference between these aspects of color as they relate to the "structure-free
fields of view" of the Wyszecki-Stiles definition, assuming that the two fields are
precisely joined. Unless they are of equal intensity, or very nearly so, the two
fields will be distinguished as different, and a contour will be formed between
them. If the two fields differ in radiance (physical intensity per unit area) but have
the same relative distributions of radiance as a function of wavelength, there will
be an achromatic color difference between them. If the radiances of two such
fields are equated, or differ by a physical amount too small to be discriminated,
the fields will match exactly and the contour separating them will disappear.
Chromatic color differences occur when the relative spectral distributions of
the two fields are dissimilar. In this case, there is ordinarily no relative radiance
of the two fields that will cause them to appear identical or that, in general,
will eliminate the contour formed between them. There are important excep-
tions. Some fields that differ spectrally nevertheless match (see the section on

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212 R.M. Boynton

Metamerism) and some fields that do not match at any relative radiance
nevertheless fail to exhibit an obvious contour between them (Tansley and Boyn-
ton, 1978; Boynton et al., 1985).
Most of the time, in the real world, achromatic and chromatic color differ-
ences occur together and most contours are formed by a combination of the two
(Frome et al., 1981). As evidenced by the typically minor loss of perceptible con-
tour in black-and-white reproductions, achromatic contours vastly predominate.
Given the technical definition of color, which will be adopted here, all vision
then becomes color vision from the viewpoint that the visual field is made up of
regions of more-or-less homogeneous colors separated by boundaries that are
formed by color differences. When the regions are very small, as in color televi-
sion, complex and realistic visual scenes can be represented by an array comprised
of a very large number of tiny and homogeneous colored dots, called pixels.
This chapter will emphasize chromatic color perception. When the word "color"
is used without a modifier, chromatic color is the intended concept.

Functions of Color
Broadly defined, visual perception is concerned with the extraction of useful
information from the external physical world. The adequate stimulus for vision,
of course, is light. Each quantum of light, or photon, has associated with it a
specific and unalterable energy, one which is inversely related to its wavelength.
Chromatic color vision occurs under so-called photopic conditions, where illu-
mination is strong, and many millions of photons are available. Typically these
conditions are provided by sources exhibiting a broad and continuous distribu-
tion of wavelengths across the visible spectrum, which, for example, is the case
for sunlight or incandescent illumination. Our perceptual apparatus has evolved
to make good use of this spectral information if sufficient light is available. Vision
mediated by rods, at scotopic radiances too low for cones to function, is achro-
matic. An impoverished form of color vision occurs at intermediate, or mesopic
levels of illumination.
That color is important aesthetically seems undeniable: almost everyone agrees
that color adds beauty and sparkle to the world, and that it affects mood. However,
attempts to deal with such aspects of color scientifically have been of very limited
value (Kaiser, 1984). Because these subjective aspects of color belong more
properly to the worlds of art and fashion than to science, we will not attempt to deal
with them in this chapter.
Of those aspects of color that can be discerned and studied quantitatively, two
stand out. One of these, related to the formation of contour, has already been men-
tioned in the previous section. Although achromatic contours do predominate,
there are occasions when they disappear and the remaining chromatic contours
provide the sole basis for contour perception. This is called an isoluminant condi-
tion (Gregory, 1977), referring to the fact that two or more regions in the visual
field are of equal luminance (see section on Luminance, Brightness, and Light-