A review of the field of lightness perception from Helmholtz to the present shows the most adequate theories of lightness perception to be the intrinsic image models. Nevertheless, these models fail on 2 important counts: They contain no anchoring rule, and they fail to account for the pattern of errors in surface lightness. Recent work on both the anchoring problem and the problem of errors ha...

Lightness is the apparent reflectance of a surface, and it depends not only on the actual luminance of the surface but also on the context in which the surface is viewed [1-10]. The cortical mechanisms of lightness processing are largely unknown, and the role of early cortical areas is still a matter of debate [11-17]. We studied the cortical responses to lightness variations in early stages of...

An anchoring theory of lightness perception by Gilchrist et al. [1999] explains many characteristics of human visual system such as lightness constancy and its spectacular failures which are important in the perception of images. The principal concept of this theory is the perception of complex scenes in terms of groups of consistent areas (frameworks). Such areas, following the gestalt theoris...

A fundamental problem in image analysis is to understand the nature of the computations and mechanisms that provide information about the material properties of surfaces. Information about a surface’s 3D shape, optics, illumination field, and atmospheric conditions are conflated in the image, which must somehow be disentangled to derive the properties of surfaces. It was recently suggested that...

BACKGROUND Surface lightness perception is affected by scene interpretation. There is some experimental evidence that perceived lightness under bi-ocular viewing conditions is different from perceived lightness in actual scenes but there are also reports that viewing conditions have little or no effect on perceived color. We investigated how mixes of depth cues affect perception of lightness in...

A common theoretical framework for brightness and lightness perception In a review of the brightness/lightness literature, Kingdom (2011) noted that " Divided into different camps, each with its own preferred stimuli, methodology and theory, the study of LBT [lightness, brightness, transparency] is sometimes more reminiscent of the social sciences with its deep ideological divides than it is of...

Simultaneous lightness contrast is a classical visual illusion, which has been the focus of research for several generations of visual scientists. Still, there is no agreement on its mechanisms. There are two main competing accounts. The first is descended from ideas of Ewald Hering [Hering, E., Outline of a Theory of the Light Sense, (1874), translated from the German by L. Hurvich and D. Jame...

The term simultaneous lightness constancy describes the capacity of the visual system to perceive equal reflecting surfaces as having the same lightness despite lying in different illumination fields. In some cases, however, a lightness constancy failure occurs; that is, equal reflecting surfaces appear different in lightness when differently illuminated. An open question is whether the luminan...