Abstract
For more than a century the process of chromatic adaptation has been modeled using derivatives of the original von Kries hypothesis that the cones adapt largely independently and dependent on their general states of stimulation.[1] Such models have been implemented in physiological experiments and in international standards such as CIECAM02.[2] While it is easy to write down the von Kries hypothesis in equations, setting the parameters of such equations remains a bit of a mystery. Does chromatic adaptation depend on the light source, the scene average, a local average somehow integrated in time and space, cognitive interpretation of the stimuli, or all of the above in some unknown combination? This presentation aims to explore the titular question by reviewing historical experiments on stimulus complexity,[3] temporal adaptation,[4] spatial adaptation,[5] examining recent data on the precision and reversibility of corresponding colors experiments,[6,7] and proposing a new theory/model with hysteresis-based dependencies for the traditional von Kries coefficients. It is hoped this will prompt some discussion on the physiological basis for mechanisms of chromatic adaptation that could be used to guide future colorimetric models.[8]
This work was supported by the Munsell Color Science Laboratory Endowment.