Measuring of the Perceptibility and Acceptability in Various Color Quality Measures

Perceptibility and acceptability are the most often used threshold units in the field of color science. The former refers to a just perceptible difference and the latter evokes a tolerable color difference. Such thresholds can be very significant to color quality control processes in the printing industry and should be defined in quality measure units. Optical density (OD) and color difference models are usually utilized as color quality measures and have been provided in a considerable number of commercial measuring devices such as spectrophotometers. However, their merits and traits are far less understood in the literature. The present study intends to evaluate performance of those color quality measures including the OD and widely known color difference models, e.g. <TEX>ΔE^*ab</TEX>, <TEX>ΔECMC(l:c)</TEX> and <TEX>ΔE^*₀₀</TEX>. A set of psychophysical assessments were carried out in order to accumulate the perceptibility and acceptability thresholds data, and their central trend was compared with the color quality measure estimates.