Impact of the adapted white point and the cultural background on memory color assessments

Abstract

AbstractWith their inherent ability of serving as an internal reference, memory colors provide a very powerful concept in the evaluation of color rendering properties of white light sources with respect to visual appreciation. Recent results for example suggest fairly good correlations between memory‐based color quality metrics and the observers' general color preferences. However, due to technical limitations in the design of the underlying psychophysical experiments, they generally lack the explicit inclusion of realistic viewing and adaptation conditions, which is supposed to have a nonnegligible impact on the model prediction performance. In addition, intercultural effects might play a crucial role in the context of memory colors. For these reasons, the current article investigates the impact of both the adapted white point and the observers' cultural background on memory color assessments in order to contribute to a better understanding of these dependencies and their interactions. For this purpose, the color appearance rating results of Chinese and German observers were collected for a selection of 12 different familiar test objects assessed under two different adaptation conditions at 3200 K and 5600 K, respectively. From the statistical analysis of the experimental data, it is shown, in accordance to previous studies, that the impact of the observed intercultural deviations is likely to be of no practical importance even though significance is found. Despite considerably larger effect sizes, the same must be concluded for the two tested adaptation conditions.