Artificial color vision: a preliminary study

Abstract

Animals accomplish color vision by characterizing the scene in two or more spectrally overlapping bands, normalizing to minimize brightness effects, computing spectral discriminants (called hues) from the normalized readings, and attributing those hues to the scene with the brightness variations restored in the colored image. We explore doing the same process in forming images for camera systems. To make experimental testing simpler, we use available spectrally overlapping band cameras—color CCD cameras—whose bands show considerable overlap but were not chosen for the task to which we employ them. We use these bands and a very small number of samples from each class of object to form a single artificial color—green pepper but not snow peas and not An image of a plate of such vegetables in that artificial color shows the green pepper but not the snow peas and not the carrots.