What are the basic differences between machine and human vision when it comes to color?
Human color vision is extremely versatile in that it can reliably extract information about objects despite huge variations in illumination and view. For example, humans can reliably judge fruit based on color, distinguishing ripe from unripe or bad fruit despite varying illumination and viewing perspective. Human color vision has inherent mechanisms that “factor out” variations in illumination and view, things we don’t know how — or don’t bother — to put into machine color vision. Human color vision, on the other hand, is relative in that nearby colors influence the perception of a particular color. It also has low resolution (a fact used to transmit color in television with very little bandwidth) and differs widely between individuals, making it not a very good measuring tool. Machine color vision, by contrast, is not influenced by nearby colors, can have high resolution, does not vary much from machine to machine, and thus is a good measuring tool.
