Material and lighting hues of object colour

Abstract

Observers can easily differentiate between a pigmented stain and the white surface that it lies on. The same applies for a colour shadow cast upon the same surface. Although the difference between these two kinds of colour appearance (referred to as material and lighting hues) is self-evident even for inexperienced observers, it is not one that has been captured by any colour appearance model thus far. We report here on an experiment supplying evidence for the dissociation of these two types of hue in the perceptual space. The stimulus display consisted of two identical sets of Munsell papers illuminated independently by yellow, neutral, and blue lights. Dissimilarities between all the paper/light pairs were ranked by five trichromatic observers, and then analysed by using non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS). In the MDS output configuration, the Munsell papers lit by the same light made a closed configuration retaining the same order as in the Munsell book. The paper configurations for the yellow and blue lights were displaced transversally and in parallel to each other, with that of the neutral light located in between. The direction of the shift is interpreted as the yellow-blue lighting dimension. We show that the yellow-blue lighting dimension cannot be reduced to that of the reflected light.