Colorimetric Observer Categories for Young and Aged Using Paired-Comparison Experiments

Observers with normal color vision have different color perceptions since their retinal cones have different spectral responses, especially when the color pairs are constituted by different primary colors. In order to categorize the color-matching functions (CMFs) for young and aged observers, seven devices with different primary colors were performed on the clustering of observers' CMFs. Four CMFs were generated from Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication (BIGC) with paired-comparison color matching experiments based on five printed colors from young and aged observers performed under fluorescent light source (Experiment I). Besides, color comparison experiments based on three printed colors under light emitting diodes (LEDs) light source were also carried out (Experiment II). And then, the existing CMFs, including Commission Internationale de l' Eclairage 1964 (CIE 1964), CIE 1989 standard deviate observer (CIE 1989 SDO), CIE 2006, Sarkar 1 to Sarkar 8, Asano 1 to Asano 10, BIGC 1 to BIGC 4 were tested with the results from Experiments I and II respectively. The results indicated that the visual data from young and aged observers had quite large discrepancies. When they viewed printed materials illuminated by fluorescent and LED light sources in a field of view larger than 10°, based on the standardized residual sum of squares (STRESS) values and the number of the observers contributed to the minimum STRESS values, two new CMFs were proposed to represent the young and aged observers who participated in our experiments.