The role of colour as a monocular depth cue

Abstract

Does colour information play a role in the perception of depth? Its input to stereopsis is weak, and it has been suggeted that depth from monocular cues, such as texture gradients, is also abolished at isoluminance (colour contrast with no luminance contrast). We first investigated whether depth from texture gradients disappears at isoluminance. The percept remained unaltered. Further experiments revealed that certain colour gradients (at isoluminance) markedly affected the perceived depth. A gradient in saturation (e.g. red-to-grey) was particularly effective, whereas a red-green hue gradient had no effect on perceived slant. We concluded that colour information can be used by the visual system to encode depth, especially in situations where the visual environment is rich in cues which could be used to signal depth in this way.