What is it about?
Colour provides us with information about the environment. But research in the laboratory rarely captures the complex and uncertain structure of the natural world, containing trees, shrubs, herbs, flowers, grasses, soil, stones, and rock. This research quantifies some of the failures of human colour vision that result from this uncertainty, and indicates how they can be predicted.
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Why is it important?
The variation of colours in the environment suggests that little can be predicted. But it turns out that failures to identify and distinguish materials can be explained by a mathematical measure of the randomness of colours, the so-called Shannon entropy.
Perspectives
This paper is based in part on the author’s Verriest Medal Lecture delivered to the International Colour Vision Society, Erlangen, 2017.
Professor David H. Foster
University of Manchester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Verriest Lecture: Color vision in an uncertain world, Journal of the Optical Society of America A, March 2018, Optical Society of America (OSA),
DOI: 10.1364/josaa.35.00b192.
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