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De Valois & De Valois's color model

In [De Valois \& De Valois 1975], the authors suggest that the six types of LGN cells found (see Section ) can be grouped into three dimensions, when mirror-image pairs are combined into one dimension. That results in red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white dimensions, which can be arranged in a ``double cone''-type color space. Hue would be coded in a circular fashion (ranging through blue, green, yellow, red, and back to blue), saturation as distance from the center of the hue circle (making hue and saturation specifiable with a polar coordinate system in the plane), and brightness along an axis perpendicular to the hue circle. This kind of color space is well known from early work of, e.g., Munsell [Birren 1969a][Munsell 1946] and Ostwald [Birren 1969b]. De Valois and De Valois also mention that this kind of color model can be ``semiquantitatively'' tested, e.g., through color naming experiments. My color model, presented in Chapter , is very close in spirit to the model they suggest, but as their adjective use suggests, theirs is not specified in any quantitative detail. Their model is certainly not specified well enough to be usable in the context of computer vision.

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