Color Appearance and the Digital Imaging Pipeline

An effective image reproduction pipeline, spanning image capture, processing and display, must be designed to account for the properties of the human observer. In designing an image pipeline, three principles of human vision are particularly important: trichromacy, color adaptation, and pattern-color sensitivity. These properties also play an important role in metrics used to evaluate image quality reproduction. The main portion of this review comprises a description of these properties of the visual system and how these principles are incorporated into the image reproduction pipeline. The last part of this review describes a new image capture technology, based on a digital pixel fabricated on a CMOS process. This sensor is well-designed for exploring a novel image pipeline architecture that we call multiple-capture, single-image. This architecture is being developed to serve features of human vision that are not yet incorporated in the conventional pipeline.