What the physical meaning of sharper cone reponse in CIECAM02?
There is no direct physical meaning to these sharpened responses in terms of cone responses. They are not cone responses at all (as is clear from the negative parts of the curves). Instead, they represent combinations of cone responses that could potentially exist at higher levels of the visual system. The result is that these responses, together with multiplicative normalization, seem to fairly well model the overall processes of the visual system. Sharpened responses produce a chromatic adaptation transform with predictions closer to perfect “color constancy” and it makes sense that von Kries scaling in the actual cone responses combined with other mechanisms of adaptation at higher levels would also result in such responses.
