Abstract
The Poisson fluctuation in absorbed photons occurring when a photoreceptor is exposed to monochromatic light (Geisler, 1989) does not give us, for an array of identical receptors exposed to uniform multi-wavelength light, the proportion of receptors at each specific level of absorbed energy. Here we derived it. The resulting distribution of responses within the CIE 1931 chromaticity space resembles MacAdam's (1942) magnified scatterings for the variability of color matches. As our approach applies to any array of photosensitive elements, living or non-living, we found that it predicts well the spatial variation of pixel values when a sub-array of a CMOS sensor is exposed to a uniformly illuminated color patch. This implies that variations in reflectivity of individual cones observed in microscopic images of human retina (Roorda & Williams, 1999; Pallikaris, Williams, & Hofer, 2003) used to infer cone absorptance may partly be due to the nature of light as it interacts with identical interleaved receptors.
Meeting abstract presented at the 2016 OSA Fall Vision Meeting