Physiological causes of individual variations in color-matching functions

The present study confirms that the individual variations of Stiles' 20 color-matching functions are physiologically well predicted by those of eye lens and macular optical densities. The principal-component analysis of the blue color-matching functions shows the significance of the two independent spectral components, which are expected to correspond to lens and macular optical densities. The lens and the macular densities for each of Stiles' 20 observers are estimated by using their published data physiologically measured. The estimated densities predict well each of Stiles' 20 color-matching functions. The singular-value decomposition of the estimated 20 color-matching functions provides a good estimate of the standard-deviate observer derived from the original Stiles 20 color-matching functions by using the same procedure.