Abstract

Although most models of the eye predict the presence of chromatic aberration, colored fringes are not typically seen at the edges of objects. Luminance transients introduced by transverse chromatic aberration (TCA) of the eye were computed, using a reduced eye model (Thibos, 1987), for thin vertical lines equiluminant with a background. The spectral distributions used were typical of phosphors from a television screen; the lines were presented off-axis. The transients produced were incremental and decremental perturbations on each side of the lines and were sufficiently large to be expected to be visible. The largest transients occurred for conditions that included the R phosphor, probably because of its narrow-band peak at approximately around 620 nm. If the spatial distribution of receptor excitation is examined instead, the problem becomes one of determining how the different receptor classes calibrate the location of their images. We examined the spatial distribution of receptor excitation that results from TCA for rods and the three cone types for several lighting models and derived sufficient conditions for an adaptive algorithm to reduce or eliminate the effect of TCA.

© 1990 Optical Society of America