Observer Metamerism Models and Multiprimary Display Systems

Abstract

Television and cinema displays are both trending toward greater ranges and saturation of reproduced colors, which are made possible by near-monochromatic illumination technologies. Through current broadcast and digital cinema standards work, system designs employing laser light sources, narrowband light-emitting diodes, quantum dots, and others are being actively endorsed in promotion of a wide color gamut. However, spectrally selective excitations of naturally different human color response functions exacerbate variability of observer experience. Furthermore, singular “standard observer” summaries of human color vision, such as those found in the International Commission on Illumination (CIE)'s 1931 and 1964 color-matching functions and extensively used in motion picture color management, are deficient in recognizing expected human vision variability. Many researchers have confirmed the magnitude of observer metamerism in color matching, but few have shown explicit color management with an aim of minimized observer perception variability. This paper shows that not only can observer metamerism influences be quantitatively predicted and confirmed psychophysically but that intentionally engineered multiprimary displays employing more than three primaries can also offer an increased color gamut with drastically improved consistency of experience.