Investigating unique hues at different chroma levels with a smaller hue angle step.

Abstract

Unique hue plays a critical role in color appearance models and uniform color spaces. Past studies investigating unique hues commonly used 40 Munsell samples with the same chroma and lightness levels to produce color stimuli, with a hue angle step of 9°. These 40 samples were always simultaneously presented to the observers. Both the larger hue angle step and the simultaneous presentation of the samples may help to reduce the variations. In this study, we reduced the hue angle step to 5° and each stimulus was individually presented to the observer, which resulted in larger inter- and intra-observer variations. The results suggested that the hue angles of the unique hues in both CIECAM02 and CIELAB should be revised, but both CIECAM02 and CIELAB had good hue uniformity at the hue angles of the four unique hues.