Ba. Wandell, COLOR APPEARANCE - THE EFFECTS OF ILLUMINATION AND SPATIAL PATTERN, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United Statesof America, 90(21), 1993, pp. 9778-9784
The color we perceive at each point in an image depends on information
spread across the three spatial arrays of cone photoreceptors. I desc
ribe experiments aimed at clarifying how information is integrated acr
oss the spatial arrays to yield a color experience. We have found that
changes of color appearance due to changes of the ambient illuminatio
n and the pattern's spatial frequency can be described by using a simp
le set of optical and neural transformations. Each transformation can
be thought of as having two parts. First, the transformation converts
the color representation into a new coordinate frame that is independe
nt of the image contents. Second, the transformation scales the neural
responses in the new coordinate frame by a gain factor that depends o
n the image contents.