Estimating the information available from colored surfaces in natural scenes

Abstract

The information preserved in identifying surfaces solely by their color can be quantified by measures defined by Shannon, including capacity and mutual information. The aim of this study was (1) to determine whether the capacity of an additive Gaussian channel provides an asymptotic upper bound to mutual information estimated for natural scenes under different illuminants, and (2) to explore the effect of different color representations on mutual-information estimates.