Individual differences in human colour vision as derived from Stiles and Burch 10° colour matching functions

Individual differences between the 49 Stiles & Burch observers have been analyzed using the object-colour space put forth recently (J of Vision 2009;9:1–23). A set of rectangular reflectance spectra has been used as a common frame of reference for representing object colours for all the observers. Being metameric to one of these rectangular reflectance spectra, every reflectance spectrum can be geometrically represented as a point in the three-dimentional space. The interindividual differences reveal themselves in that, for various observers, the same reflectance spectrum maps to different points in this space. It has been found that on average such differences do not exceed the differences in object-colour appearance induced by an illumination shift from daylight to the fluorescent daylight simulator F1. Such small individual variations have been accounted for by the fact that the cone spectral tuning curves have a special form that mitigates the individual differences in cone spectral positioning.