Colour Science & Perception
what the eye settles, and what it cannot
Concept

Camera profile — where it appears

The transformation from a camera's raw channel responses to tristimulus values, usually a 3×3 fitted by least squares over a set of surfaces. Its reported accuracy is a statement about that set: the same profile scores a factor of five apart on charts of different saturation.

Named by 10 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

How far each census row moves when the test set's own description does. A grid of bars, one row per change of light in the census and one bar in each row per number that describes the region the test surfaces are drawn from: how saturated they are, how bright, and how far the two modulations may go together. A bar's length is the elasticity — the proportional change in the published residual for a proportional change in that number. Saturation runs from 0.49 to 0.91 and brightness averages 0.104, so a test set's chroma range is nearly everything and its lightness range is nearly nothing. For scale, the largest elasticity found anywhere among this collection's five declared population widths is about a half — and those at least have declared ranges, while these three numbers have never been quoted with one.

Saturation is nearly everything

The set of test surfaces has three numbers describing it, and only one of them matters. How saturated the surfaces are carries an elasticity of about 0.7 on every result computed over them; how bright they are carries 0.10. A test chart's chroma range decides its answer and its lightness range does not.

difference · Metric How far each census row moves when the test set's own description does. A grid of bars, one row per change of light in the census and one bar in each row per number that describes the region the test surfaces are drawn from: how saturated they are, how bright, and how far the two modulations may go together. A bar's length is the elasticity — the proportional change in the published residual for a proportional change in that number. Saturation runs from 0.49 to 0.91 and brightness averages 0.104, so a test set's chroma range is nearly everything and its lightness range is nearly nothing. For scale, the largest elasticity found anywhere among this collection's five declared population widths is about a half — and those at least have declared ranges, while these three numbers have never been quoted with one.

A chart decides what a camera scores

A camera profile's reported error changes by a factor of five when the test chart's saturation changes, with the camera and its matrix untouched. The elasticity is 0.67 — the same figure, to two per cent, that an entirely unrelated measurement over an entirely unrelated set of surfaces gives.

imaging · Capture Two sensitivities from two libraries, under every unit. Two quantities that share no code, no test set and no physical question: how much the adaptation census's residual depends on how saturated its surfaces are, and how much a camera profile's reported error depends on how saturated its test chart is. The first is a mean over fourteen changes of light built from cosine combinations; the second is one number about one silicon sensor scored on Gaussian bumps. Under the published unit they sit at 0.687 and 0.656. Across the whole menu they move together, from about 0.5 under the appearance unit to about 1.15 under plain CIELAB, staying within 12 per cent of each other at the worst point. Two numbers agreeing once is a coincidence; two curves agreeing at six points across a factor of two and a half is a shared mechanism, and the mechanism is the compression the unit applies to a chroma difference.

The coincidence was a mechanism

Two sensitivities from two libraries with no shared code came out two per cent apart, and the claim made about them was that they share a mechanism rather than a number. That claim has a colour-difference formula inside it, so it can be tested by changing the formula — and both curves move together across the whole menu, from 0.5 to 1.15.

imaging · Capture A camera matrix refitted to minimise each unit, rather than solved in XYZ. Every camera profile here, and as far as can be told every camera profile anybody ships, is a linear least-squares solve in XYZ. That is an objective and it is on nobody's menu: it weights a difference by how large the tristimulus values are. Each row here refits the same 3×3 by direct search to minimise one of the six units instead. The upper bar is how much better the fit gets in that unit; the lower is how far the matrix itself moves, as a relative Frobenius norm. Both matter and they do not agree: CAM16-UCS moves the matrix least, at 0.34 per cent, for the largest improvement of the six, while ΔE*94 moves it 6.8 times as far for less. A score that changes is a report changing; a matrix that changes is the camera rendering different pixels.

The objective nobody chose

Every camera profile here, and as far as can be told everywhere, is a linear least-squares solve in tristimulus space. That is an objective and it is on nobody's menu — it weights an error by how bright the patch is. Refitting the same matrix to minimise a real colour-difference formula improves the fit in all six, and moves the matrix, which means different pixels rather than a different report.

imaging · Capture The collection's adaptation census, with its surfaces departed. Each row is one of the fourteen changes of light in this site's adaptation census, and the bar is what a von Kries gain leaves behind. The open marks are the published numbers; the filled ones are the same computation with every one of the hundred and twenty-five test surfaces replaced by what an instrument with an aperture, or a room with a direction in it, actually reports. Nothing moves by more than 9 per cent. A departure that does not depend on the light is very largely absorbed by the observer's own gain, because it changes the reflectance and the gain is applied afterwards. The fourth departure is not on this chart and cannot be: a fluorescent sample has a different curve under every light, so there is no set of reflectances to hand the census at all.

The chart was measured, not photographed

A camera profile is fitted so that the camera's response maps onto the chart's tristimulus values, and those values came out of a spectrophotometer. So the profile's target carries the instrument's departures and the camera does not — a mildly translucent chart read through a four-millimetre aperture supplies targets 2.55 ΔE₀₀ from the truth, which is twice the profile's own fitting error.

imaging · Capture Each departure over forty-two surfaces rather than one. The same six departures measured over a family of forty-two analytic reflectances — an absorption band of stated centre, width and depth — with the smallest, the median, the ninety-fifth percentile and the largest marked. Every one of them spans more than a factor of three, and the ranking between them is not stable across the family: what decides a departure's size is which sample it is asked about, because a departure is a pairing and the sample is one of the two factors. Quoting any single number for what an observer's age is worth is quoting a choice of example.

The chart was measured by an observer too

A camera profile is fitted so that the camera's numbers reproduce the chart's measured tristimulus values. Those values were computed through the 1931 observer, so the fit inherits every departure in this round — and the fit's own residual, at 0.19 ΔE₀₀ on the chart, is fifteen times smaller than the term it cannot see.

imaging · Capture The arguments a standard observer does not have. Seven choices inside a set of colour-matching functions, each with the shape it takes and what it is worth in ΔE₀₀ on a red pigment under a 6500 K radiator. Six are measurements: a field size, an age, a macular density, a cone optical density, three peak wavelengths and a rod contribution. The seventh is not — a change of basis is a change of curves and not a change of observer, and its entry is exactly zero because the space an experiment measures is what an observer is. Printing that zero beside the others is the clearest statement of what the other six are measurements of.

A sensor has no lens

A camera is a fourth observer and it is the only one with none of the six arguments this round measured. It does not age, it has no macular pigment, its response does not broaden with density and its peaks do not vary — so it is perfectly reproducible and is not any of the observers it is fitted to reproduce.

imaging · Capture The confusion matrix, and which corner the common lamps are in. Twelve fixtures sorted two ways. Down the page is what their spectra are; across is what flicker says. The two corners on the diagonal are 7 fixtures the classifier gets right. The 3 missed are structured lamps that do not flicker — a white LED and a warm LED on constant drivers, and a three-emitter fixture — and those are the lamps most modern interiors are lit by. The 2 false alarms are smooth lamps that do flicker: a halogen lamp on mains and a tinted radiator, both of which a photograph of a room is quite likely to contain.

Flicker sorts lamps the wrong way

A camera cannot see a spectral line in its own white, so the essay on the two-matrix profile named the classifiers a device might have instead, and the first of them was flicker. Flicker is measurable, and it measures the wrong thing. It sorts lamps by how their power is delivered while the matrix needs them sorted by how their spectrum is shaped, and the two are independent: a white LED on a constant driver is perfectly steady and strongly structured, and it is what most indoor photographs are lit by.

imaging · Capture How far each lamp's sensor reading is from what the camera predicts, with RGB + clear. Fourteen lamps, six smooth and eight structured, each scored by how far an ambient-light sensor with red, green, blue and clear channels reads from what the camera's white predicts through a map fitted on smooth radiators and daylights. The smooth lamps score at most 0.057 and the structured at least 0.133; the dashed line is the threshold at the gap's geometric middle, 0.087. The lights the map was fitted on score at most 0.0113. Every lamp falls on its own side of the line.

Two sensors disagree about deep red, not lines

A phone's ambient-light sensor and its camera read the same lamp differently, and the difference sorts fourteen lamps into smooth and structured without a single mistake — where flicker made five. It is not reading their lines. Almost all of it comes from the sensor's clear channel collecting deep red the camera's infrared cut throws away, so daylight with its far red trimmed is called structured and a white LED with a far-red emitter is called smooth.

imaging · Capture The calibration error a narrow fourth channel survives, by where it is placed. For a red, green and blue ambient sensor with one more channel 10 nm wide, centred from 450 to 640 nm: the first calibration error at which some lamp of fourteen is misclassified. Dashed: the channel pooled into the whole residual, as the ambient sensor's disagreement was read; its best is ±1.50 per cent. Solid: the channel read on its own, as its departure from what the camera's white predicts for it; its best is ±4.0 per cent, at 450 nm. Crosses mark centres where the channel read alone does not separate the lamps at all. The two horizontal lines are the red, green and blue design (±1 per cent) and the design with a clear channel (±4 per cent).

A narrow channel has to be read on its own

An ambient sensor with a clear channel tells structured lamps from smooth ones by reading deep red, and one without it reads structure but breaks at one per cent of calibration error. A narrow fourth channel between the camera's peaks was proposed to have both. Pooled into the sensor's disagreement with the camera, it reads structure and breaks at one and a quarter per cent — no better than the design it was meant to rescue. Read on its own, as its departure from what the camera predicts for it, a channel at 450 nm holds to four per cent, the clear channel's figure, and far red does not move it.

imaging · Capture

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

CalibrationLuther conditionColour differenceColour matrixLeast-squaresObserver metamerismTest setCamera rawChromaElasticityFluorescentIdentifiability

All concepts