Understanding Color Memory: A Study of Skin Tone Perception in Hue, Intensity, and Chroma

Perceptually, one of the strongest memory colors is skin tone. Get it wrong and it's hard to miss. Image adjustments are commonly applied for preference-based image enhancement, and they are applied across a variety of color spaces, so it's important to understand the effects these procedures have on skin tone appearance. In this paper, we present results of a psychovisual experiment that explores the perception of skin tone under changes in hue, chroma, and intensity. Through coupling the effects each axis has on perception of different skin tones, viewer expectations of color appearance can be evaluated. The experimental results convey a low tolerance for changes in hue when altering intensity and chroma and a high tolerance for changes in intensity across all adjustments. When altering intensity, the results present changes in chroma that follow the shape of the ITP gamut hull. There was some variability between skin tones. This speaks to how individual skin tone classification may be helpful to preserve colorimetric appearance following adjustment.

Published

2022-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Skin tone, hue, chroma, intensity, psychovisual experiment, image processing

DOI

10.5594/M001977

ISBN

978-1-61482-963-8