Abstract
Background: One of the potential hypothesis for explaining the individual differences in perceiving #TheDress is ambiguity in illumination interpretation. Asymmetry between luminance and blue-yellow in variations of natural sunlight is suspected to play an important role. Here, to test the hypothesis, color matching experiments were conducted for variants of #TheDress. Methods: As for the visual stimuli, we manipulated the hue and/or luminance contrast of the original #TheDress: original (OR), hue reversed (HR), luminance contrast reversed (LR), hue and luminance contrast reversed (HLR). Observers were asked to view one of these images displayed on a calibrated monitor and to match the dress/lace colors in CIELUV uniform color space by selecting the closest color among 25 uniform rectangular color patches equally spaced in L*, u* and v* coordinates by button press. Observers were pre-categorized into blue-black (BK) and white-gold (WG) groups by their color naming responses to the original. Results: Matches between BK and WG differ in L* (lightness) and v* (blue-yellow direction) for the OR which duplicated the previous observations. However, L* matches for the bright lace part in the HR image still differ among groups although individual differences in color naming vanished. For both the LR and HLR, however, we found no differences in matches between groups although the HLR image had the same luminance-color structure (bright blue and dark yellow) as the original. Discussions: Results imply that luminance-contrast polarity is the one of the key factors affecting the individual differences in #TheDress. This is because reversing the luminance-contrast may disambiguate indirect/direct illumination interpretations. Furthermore, specular highlights do not work as a local cue for the illuminant color in the luminance-contrast reversed images.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017