New research into how humans perceive color differences is helping resolve questions tied to a theory first proposed nearly 100 years ago by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. A team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Roxana Bujack used geometry to mathematically describe how people experience hue, saturation and lightness. Their findings, presented at a visualization science conference, strengthen and formalize Schrödinger’s model by showing these color qualities are fundamental properties of the color system itself.
“What we conclude is that these color qualities don’t emerge from additional external constructs such as cultural or learned experiences but reflect the intrinsic properties of the color metric itself,” Bujack said. “This metric geometrically encodes the perceived color distance — that is, how different two colors appear to an observer.”
By formally defining these perceptual characteristics, the researchers believe they have supplied a crucial missing piece in Schrödinger’s long-standing vision of a complete model capable of defining hue, saturation, and lightness entirely through geometric relationships between colors.
