Colour Engineering: Achieving Device Independent Colour

This book is an attempt at compiling a concise yet descriptive text on a variety of topics in the color processing chain in a digital color imaging device/system. As the title of the book suggests, the aim of this book is to put activities of various academic and industrial groups, either as proprietary research or through standards bodies, into perspective. The editors achieve this by collecting 18 different chapters from a wide gamut of authors, each a prominent figure in the community. As may be expected with any such compilation, achieving a continuous flow while keeping overlaps to a minimum is a difficult task. The editors, Phil Green and Lindsay MacDonald, however have done a wonderful job of achieving this, although some overlaps are bound to creep in. In the preface, the authors state that the book is organized into four sections, the first dealing with color science fundamentals, the second describing the characterization of color imaging devices, the third describing some current themes in color management and finally, the fourth covering activities in various industrial setups and standards committees. In my opinion, Chapters 1–5 would fall in the first category, Chapters 6–8 and 10 would fall into the second, Chapters 11–17 would fall into the third, and the last chapter would fall into the fourth category. I have intentionally left Chapter 9 out of the above classification as it deserves a category to itself as an excellent resource. I shall touch upon this in a later paragraph as I briefly describe each chapter. In Chapter 1, Arthur Tarrant presents a host of fundamentals in color science in a concise fashion, touching upon various terms used in the first part of CIE Publication 15.2 and some fundamentals about light transmission and reflection. He also introduces metamerism, which is a hard task given that colorimetry isn’t yet defined in this book. In any case, the chapter