White appearance and chromatic adaptation on a display under different ambient lighting conditions

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the perception of neutral white and chromatic adaptation on a display under ambient lighting conditions with different chromaticities and illuminance levels. The desktop display was arranged to simulate a mobile phone. The neutral white was the whitest point that excluded chromatic color. Only one original image was used and it comprised black text against a white background under CIE illuminant D65 and the CIE 1964 standard colorimetric observer. Forty‐two rendered images were made to cover a representative area of chromaticity space that might be considered white. Eleven ambient lighting conditions were applied with five values of correlated color temperature (3000, 4000, 5000, 6000, and 8000 K) each at two illuminance levels (500 and 1000 lx) plus a dark condition. A psychophysical experiment was conducted where observers were asked to judge each image in terms of “neutrality” under each ambient lighting condition. The results showed that there were significant differences between different ambient lighting conditions. All the available data including the present were used to develop an incomplete chromatic adaptation function with different scaling factors for the incomplete adaptation factor ( D ) in CAT02. The function suggests that the illuminance and chromaticity of the illuminant had a clear trend on chromatic adaptation. However, the degree of adaptation is affected by the viewing conditions in each experiment.