Nature Neuroscience
6, 641 - 644 (2003)
Published online: 12 May 2003; | doi:10.1038/nn1060
Color brings relief to human visionFrederick A A Kingdom
McGill Vision Research Unit, 687 Pine Ave. W., Room H4-14, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1A1, Canada.
Correspondence should be addressed to Frederick A A Kingdom fred.kingdom@mcgill.caIn natural scenes, chromatic variations, and the luminance variations that are aligned with them, mainly arise from surfaces such as flowers or painted objects. Pure or near-pure luminance variations, on the other hand, mainly arise from inhomogeneous illumination such as shadows or shading. Here, I provide evidence that knowledge of these color−luminance relationships is built into the machinery of the human visual system. When a pure-luminance grating is added to a differently oriented chromatic grating, the resulting 'plaid' appears to spring into three-dimensional relief, an example of 'shape-from-shading'. By psychophysical measurements, I found that the perception of shape-from-shading in the plaid was triggered when the chromatic and luminance gratings were not aligned, and suppressed when the gratings were aligned. This finding establishes a new role for color vision in determining the three-dimensional structure of an image: one that exploits the natural relationships that exist between color and luminance in the visual world.
|
