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Colour Vision

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Machine Vision Handbook
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Introduction

The sensation of colour arises as a result of the brain’s response to variations in the wavelength of light received by the eye. It provides the brain with signals representing four different views of a scene. (Rod cells and three different types of cone cells provide these signals in the eye.) Hence, we can regard the eye-brain complex as a system that generates four precisely aligned images. These are then compared/combined with each other within the brain but the way in which this is done remains enigmatic. There are many subtle features of human colour vision but we shall argue that many of them need not concern us, as our objectives in Machine Vision are quite specific.

The scientific study of colour (Colour Science) is a complex subject; it is concerned with the perception of colour by the human/animal eye, the origin of colour in materials, colour in art and fashion, photography, printing and video, as well as the physics of light. Colour Science encompasses many...

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Correspondence to Bruce G. Batchelor .

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag London Ltd.

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Batchelor, B.G. (2012). Colour Vision. In: Batchelor, B.G. (eds) Machine Vision Handbook. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-169-1_4

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