Study of Systematic Chromatic Changes in Color Space to Model Color Transparency

Several studies have suggested that translation and convergence in a linear trichromatic color space lead to the perception of transparency, but other transformations, such as shear and rotation,do not. We have designed a psychophysical experiment to study thelimits of such systemic chromatic changes, adding categories such as different luminance levels and vector lengths. The number of our stimuli and the number of observations provide strong statistical support for D'Zmura's model. Our main results show that for vectors exceeding a minimal length, convergence and translation (except in the equiluminant plane) lead to the perception of transparency, while shear and divergence do not. However, our results reveal that small shears and divergences also appear transparent. We also found that large translations in the equiluminant plane tend to be less often judged as transparent.