Color appearance rating of familiar real objects under immersive viewing conditions

With the concept of memory colors being considered to play a crucial role for many imaging and lighting applications, the questions how people assess the color appearance of familiar objects and what kind of fundamental characteristics can be derived from these assessments have extensively been studied in the past. However, all of the previous studies, the authors of this article are aware of, lack in realistic viewing and adaptation conditions. In the attempt of overcoming these deficiencies, a new experiment investigating the impact of long‐term memory on the color appearance ratings of 12 familiar test objects was performed. The pooled observer data were modeled in CIECAM02 color space using bivariate Gaussian functions whose centroids define the corresponding memory color centers for each test object. Comparisons with previous results obtained by Smet et al. revealed no significant differences in the reported memory color centers, but showed distinct deviations in the covariance matrices defining the shape of the fitted distribution functions. It is supposed that this new set of functions will lead to significantly different results when being used for the construction of an updated memory‐based color quality metric.