Anya Hurlbert

Anya Hurlbert is Professor of Visual Neuroscience at the Newcastle University in the UK.
Her background is in physics, medicine and neuroscience, with her higher education and early career research experience taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. She holds degrees from Princeton, Cambridge, MIT, and Harvard. Her research focuses on color perception, light and behaviour, and image analysis in art and biomedicine. She co-founded the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle, served as Scientific Trustee of the National Gallery in London, and is Trustee of the Science Museum Group. She is a member of several committees and boards in the field of vision science. Anya Hurlbert is also active in science outreach and has created science-based art exhibitions.

Anya Hurlbert: “Does perceiving the illumination have anything to do with colour constancy?”

Abstract:

An enduring question in vision science is whether people perceive the illumination, and if they do, how does that perception affect perception of surface colour, shape and space itself. Despite estimations of the illumination color being central to computational models of colour constancy and implicit in contemporary color correction algorithms for digital images, these computational estimations of illumination color are typically not compared with people’s perceptions. Although measurements of perceived illumination are complicated by interactions with perceived material, shape and space, experiments nonetheless suggest that perceived illumination does not determine perceived surface reflectance, and that the two are qualitatively and phenomenally different. I will describe both physical “plenoptic” measurements of natural illumination, including its spatial, spectral and temporal variations, and compare these with people’s perceptions and computational estimates,