Color Contrast Metrics for Complex Images

Abstract : Designers of color displays have no simple means to relate suprathreshold color contrast to performance because few of the requisite experiments have been performed. One of the obstacles has been the absence of a standardized and perceptually uniform method for representing color differences. An experiment was performed to explore the utility of several candidate metrics for predicting response speeds to colored numerals superimposed upon spatially complex multicolored backgrounds. The results show that several simple metrics accounted for substantial portions of the sample variation, despite the superficially apparent difficulties of the modelling problem. detection.