Search Results for: illumination

Let’s recap the important points from the topics we have covered about light, wavelength, spectrums, light sources, reflection, reflectance functions, cone cells, tristimulus and chromaticity space.

The light we see is a mixture of different wavelengths in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The most common source of light is incandescence from a very hot body such as our sun or the filament of an old-fashioned light bulb. The spectrum, the amount of energy as a function wavelength, follows Planck’s […]

Where does color come from? It’s a combination of effects: the light shining on the object, how the object reflects light and the eye that observes it.

As the illumination level changes so do the red, green and blue tristimulus values, but they are linearly related. We can separate brightness from chromaticity which is a two dimensional representation of color. We discuss briefly the effect of gamma encoding on the color reproduction process.

Humans have been fascinated by the sense of vision for a long time, but it took a while to figure out how it worked. We now understand that illumination falls on an object and some light is reflected into our eye where it is sensed and interpreted by our brain.

Let’s look at how light rays reflected from an object can form an image. We use the simple geometry of a pinhole camera to describe how points in a three-dimensional scene are projected on to a two-dimensional image plane.

We use MATLAB and some Toolbox functions to model the spectrum of a realistic light source, its modification after reflection from a colored object and the response of the cone cells to form a tristimulus response.