Guest Editorial: Special Section on Retinex at 40

Edwin Land first described the Retinex idea in the 1963 RESA William Proctor Prize Address, Cleveland, Ohio, on December 30, 1963. He said that it was fruitful to suggest that receptors exist in sets. A Retinex is all mechanisms from retina to cortex necessary to form images in terms of lightness. This was a distinct departure from the point-bypoint thinking that dominated physics and colorimetry. It required that models of color appearance evaluate all the pixels in the field of view as input. It is difficult in today’s world, dominated by digital images, to imagine just how novel this idea was in the 1960s. Nevertheless, many experiments in the 60s were fundamental to our understanding of human vision. Hubel and Wiesel’s studies of cat and monkey cortex, Land’s Mondrians, and Campbell and Robson’s work on human spatial frequency responses all made a strong