A test on color discrimination in complex scenes for a better comprehension of color blindness

Today, in color vision and physiology, it is well known that the phenomenon of light transduction, operated by the retinal photoreceptors, cannot fully describe color perception. Color perception, in fact, is a complex phenomenon which involves not only the signal transduction in the human retina, but also the signal elaboration made by the visual cortex. For this reason, it is fundamental to consider color perception as a result of the interaction of all the colors, shapes, shadows and lights in a scene, thus of the scene spatial arrangement. In this work, we present the results of a preliminary experiment to investigate chromatic perception phenomena in spatial contexts. To perform this test, we selected five famous paintings and we asked to color blind (CB) and non-color blind (NCB) people to complete three tasks. In the first and second test, the paintings presented a missing piece. Here, the CB and NCB users had to select the correct paint missing piece among four patches with different chromatic values, at first isolated from the painting and then added in the artwork. In the third test the users had to identify the original artwork among a set of four images of the paint fully chromatically modified. Thanks to this experiment it has been possible to have a first preliminary evaluation on the role of the spatial context in color discrimination, and it has been possible to analyze some of the main limits in color blindness actual models.