UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Museum Lighting, Colour Constancy and Melanopsin

Garside, Daniel; (2019) Museum Lighting, Colour Constancy and Melanopsin. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

[thumbnail of Garside_10088240_thesis_contacts-removed.pdf]
Preview
Text
Garside_10088240_thesis_contacts-removed.pdf

Download (30MB) | Preview

Abstract

Museums seek a pragmatic compromise between lighting which causes minimal damage to objects and lighting which allows maximal visitor enjoyment. One way to reduce damage is to choose illumination of a lower Correlated Colour Temperature (CCT), since this contains less short-wavelength radiation, which is generally more damaging. Colour appearance models suggest that a change in CCT alone should not affect visual experience, but there is a long history of studies which aim to find a `preferred' CCT for museum environments. These experiments have often had conflicting findings. One potential cause for this would be if the spectral sensitivity for adaptation differed from the spectral sensitivity for vision, as generally only the chromaticity (not the spectrum) is controlled in such experiments. Such a situation might arise if the recently discovered intrinsically photosensitive Retinal Ganglion Cells (ipRGCs), which express melanopsin, were involved in colour constancy. Two psychophysical experiments were performed whereby observers were adapted to different spectra whilst performing an achromatic matching task. The first experiment used sixteen narrow-band light sources as adapting fields, and the second used two perceptually indistinguishable sources which differed in melanopic power. Neither experiment found evidence for a role of melanopsin in colour constancy, but it was noted that the model of colour constancy implicitly under examination was under-developed and did not produce clear predictions. Regarding this, an exploratory computational study was performed, to explore whether, and in what way, a melanopsin signal might contribute to an observer's ability to achieve colour constancy. It was found that a normalised melanopic signal provided a means by which colour constancy could be roughly achieved, without the need for scene-level regularities which other algorithms rely upon. Additionally, a novel method for performing colour constancy experiments upon a tablet computer was developed, so that experiments could be run more easily within real world environments.

Type: Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification: Ph.D
Title: Museum Lighting, Colour Constancy and Melanopsin
Event: UCL (University College London)
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Author 2019. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10088240
Downloads since deposit
421Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item