Abstract

Several kinds of glare are distinguished in the literature.¹ This paper is concerned with glare caused by light scattered within the eye, often called "veiling glare".¹ It is not self-evident that the reduction of sinewave grating contrast sensitivity produced by scattered-light glare is likely to be a good predictor of the disability caused by glare in everyday visual environments because: (1) The retinal image of objects such as an automobile or a tree contains many different spatial frequency components; (2) the ability to recognize the shape of a complex object is not well predicted by the contrast detection sensitivity for sinewave gratings,^2-5 (3) it is not intuitively obvious how a contrast sensitivity loss at, say, 2 cycles/degree translates into a reduction of ability to see and recognize objects in the everyday visual environment.

© 1991 Optical Society of America