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The Munsell and Ostwald color models

The Munsell and Ostwald color order systems represent some of the earliest attempts at systematically organizing color percepts into a space [Rogers 1985][Wyszecki \& Stiles 1982][Meyer \& Greenberg 1980][Boynton 1979][Birren 1969b][Birren 1969a][Munsell 1946]. Both are defined as comparative references for artists and others to use, in a fairly impressionistic way (based on subjective observation rather than on direct measurements or controlled perceptual experiments). As such, they are still in use today, especially the Munsell color order system. The Munsell system has been and continues to some extent to be used as a standard in industry, notwithstanding attempts to introduce colorimetric models to replace it. The Munsell system was also used in [Berlin \& Kay 1969], as described in Section . Both the Munsell and Ostwald systems are based on reflective (subtractive) color samples. Although quantitative transforms to other color spaces have been defined, they are not typically used in computer vision and computer graphics work, which deals with additive color. The general shape of both systems (using cylindrical coordinates, with three dimensions corresponding roughly to the perceptual variables brightness (vertical), hue (angular displacement from a reference color), and saturation (distance from the central axis)) is preserved in many color models, including the ones more quantitative in nature.

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