Abstract

One of the classical problems in visual perception has been to understand the relative constancy of surface color judgments despite spatial and spectral variations in irradiance. One aspect of this problem has to do with the color apearance in achromatic conditions, that is, lightness constancy. Most research in lightness constancy has concentrated on conditions under which the illuminant is either constant or slowly varying in space and usually invisible. In this study, we measured the human ability to estimate the reflectance of mondrian surfaces in the presence of either visible multiplicative illumination or additive veiling overlays with sharp boundaries for both monocular and stereo viewing conditions. It was found that human observers estimate reflectance well with a relatively small bias in the direction of a luminance match.

© 1988 Optical Society of America