Abstract
In 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.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a Canadian Institute of Health Research grant (MOP-11554 to F.K.). Special thanks to D. Field and K. Mullen for suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript.
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Kingdom, F. Color brings relief to human vision. Nat Neurosci 6, 641–644 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1060
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1060
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