Capturing a black cat in shade: the past and present of Retinex color appearance models

As a part of the Symposium “Retinex at 40”, this paper recounts the research on capturing real-life scenes, calculating appearances and rendering sensations on film, and other limited dynamic-range media. It describes: the first patents, a hardware display used in Land’s Ives Medal Address in 1968, the first computer simulations using 20 by 24 pixel arrays, psychophysical experiments and computational models of color constancy and dynamic range compression and the FrankleMcCann computationally efficient Retinex image processing of 512 by 512 images. It will include several modifications of the approach including recent modifications and gamut-mapping applications. This paper emphasizes the need for parallel studies of psychophysical measurements of human vision and computational models of imaging systems.