Abstract
Color distribution largely varies among different indoor environments as well as outdoor. For example, some rooms are decorated with very colorful colors and the others are with black and white. It is not well understood how much these color variation influences to appearances of objects under those environments. It has shown that color appearance depends on chromatic surround variance, known as “Gamut expansion effect” (Brown & Macleod, 1997). They, however, used relatively small patterns on a display. It has not investigated if there is the same effect in an actual room environment. We examined if the apparent saturation of an object was influenced by the saturation of surroundings in a normal environment such as a room with furniture and objects inside.
In the experiment, two miniature rooms with gray and with colorful furniture were placed side by side and used as a reference and a test room, respectively. The colors in the test room were chosen to cover various hues. Observers compared the saturation of a small square patch in the reference and the test room and answered which was more saturated. Patches with various hues, and with low and high chroma were tested.
Our results show that the apparent saturation of patches in the test room is generally lower. This suggests that color appearance is changed slightly by the influence of saturated objects in the room. The effect is almost the same whether the test patch is immediately surrounded by colored background or not, which is consistent with pervious researches showing Gamut expansion effect is not a totally local effect. However, the shift of color appearances is very small, implying that the effect of chromatic surround variance on color appearance may be masked by other visual factors and smaller in an actual environment.