Predictive performance of the standard and the modified von Kries chromatic adaptation transforms

Abstract

To investigate chromatic adaptation and develop chromatic adaptation transforms (CATs), many psychophysical experiments have been conducted to collect corresponding colors (CC) under various illumination conditions. Most modern CATs have been developed based on a database of CC sets collected in the 20th century. More recently, several additional CC sets have been collected by Smet et al., Wei et al., and Ma et al. using memory color matching or achromatic matching methods. The analysis of these CC data indicates that for yellowish (located on or close to the Planckian locus) and greenish illuminations, the short-wave (S) sensitive cones show a lower degree of adaptation compared to the long-wave (L) and medium-wave (M) sensitive cones. This can result in a large prediction error of the standard von Kries CAT, which adopts a single degree of adaptation value for all three cone types. A modified von Kries CAT is proposed that accounts for these differences between the L-, M- and S-cone signals by applying a compression to the rescaling factor for the S-cones. It outperforms the standard von Kries CAT for the Breneman-C, Smet, Wei, and Ma data, while for other data sources the two CATs have similar performance.