05/14/2025
Theory of Human Tetrachromatic Color Experience and Printing
Thursday, May 22, 2025
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM PDT
URL: https://www.meetup.com/sv-siggraph/events/307060083/?eventOrigin=your_events #:~:text=https://acm%2Dorg.zoom.us/j/96306474444?pwd=PYEt2LaX0XnaaFbvhUN5op4CAOChhA.1
Jessica Lee, UC Berkeley, PhD Candidate
Abstract: Instead of the expected 3-colors (Red, Green, Blue), genetic studies indicate that more than 50% of women are genetically tetrachromatic, expressing four distinct types of color photoreceptors (cone cells) in the retina. At least one functional tetrachromat has been identified in laboratory tests. We hypothesize that there is a large latent group in the population capable of fundamentally richer color experience, but we are not yet aware of this group because of a lack of tetrachromatic colors in the visual environment. In this talk, we describe how we generalized color theory to predict the perceptual experience of tetrachromats, and the engineering to fabricate these tetrachromatic colors to help us identify tetrachromats in the wild. We first develop the theory to derive the key color structures for tetrachromacy, predicting that a tetrachromat’s analogue of a hue circle is a hue sphere. Then, we derive the four ideal reflectance functions that function as the CMY-equivalent printing basis for tetrachromacy, and develop a method for multi-pass inkjet printing for a chosen set of fountain pen inks. Lastly, we show how we generalize existing color tests, such as the Ishihara and the hue ordering tests, and prototyped variants towards identifying and characterizing tetrachromacy in the wild.
Bio
Jessica Lee is pursuing her PhD at UC Berkeley in Computer Science, where she is advised by Ren Ng. She is broadly interested in visual computing, and has been investigating methods to generalize color reproduction to all color experiences. She was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and her work has received a paper award at SIGGRAPH 2024.
