Observer Metamerism Models and Multiprimary Display Systems

Television and cinema display are both trending towards greater ranges and saturation of reproduced colors made possible by near-monochromatic illumination technologies. Through current broadcast and digital cinema standards work, system designs employing laser light sources, narrow-band LED, quantum dots and others are being actively endorsed in promotion of Wide Color Gamut (WCG). However, spectrally selective excitations of naturally different human color response functions exacerbate variability of observer experience. Further, singular ‘standard observer’ summaries of human color vision, such as those found in the CIE’s 1931 and 1964 color-matching-functions and used extensively in motion picture color management, are deficient in recognizing expected human vision variability. Many researchers have confirmed the magnitude of observer metamerism in color matching, but few have shown explicit color management with an aim of minimized observer perception variability. This research shows that not only can observer metamerism influences be quantitatively predicted and confirmed psychophysically but that intentionally engineered multiprimary displays employing more than three primaries can offer increased color gamut with drastically improved consistency of experience.

DLong SMPTE ATC 2015
“Observer Metamerism Models and Multiprimary Display Systems,” Proc. SMPTE Annual Technology Conference, Hollywood, CA, October 2015

Observer metamerism experiment setup (see attached paper for full details)