Deriving the Cone Fundamentals

The files posted here are the 'data' files from our GitHub repository associated with the paper entitled "Deriving the cone fundamentals: a subspace intersection method". The repository is here: https://github.com/isetbio/isetfundamentals/wiki. They are not our original data, but rather they are derived from scanning and papers in the literature; often quite old papers.

The publisher and Referees of our paper asked that we post these files in a long-lasting repository. We hope that proves useful. The files remain in the GitHub repository as well.

Abstract

Two ideas, proposed by Thomas Young and James Clerk Maxwell, form the foundations of color science: (1) Three types of retinal receptors encode light under daytime conditions, and (2) color matching experiments establish the critical spectral properties of this encoding. Experimental quantification of these ideas are used in international color standards. But, for many years the field did not reach consensus on the spectral properties of the biological substrate of color matching: the spectral sensitivity of the cone fundamentals. By combining auxiliary data (thresholds, inert pigment analyses), complex calculations, and color matching from genetically analyzed dichromats, the human cone fundamentals have now been standardized. Here we describe a new computational method to estimate the cone fundamentals using only color matching from dichromatic observers. We show that it is not necessary to include data from trichromatic observers in the analysis or to know the primary lights used in the matching experiments. Remarkably, it is even possible to estimate the fundamentals by combining data from experiments using different, unknown primaries. We then suggest how the new method may be applied to color management in modern image systems.

This repository contains the data files used in our calculations. The same files are available in the ISETBio GitHub repository at https://github.com/isetbio/isetfundamentals