What Color is the Sky (for a non-human) ?

Mesopic and low-light display transforms require, as their driving signal, a per-pixel scotopic-to-photopic luminance ratio (S/P); the exact spectral S/P is unavailable for ordinary RGB content, so a low-cost closed form that estimates S/P from a linear-RGB triplet is used in its place. Such closed forms exist but have been characterized only on narrowband / LED sources, i.e. spectrally sparse spectra, where a relative error of ~41% has been reported for a three-channel projection. Display content, however, is natural and broadband. We ask whether the same closed form is adequate there, using per-pixel spectral S/P from hyperspectral imagery as ground truth. On a daylight radiance time-series, a six-scalar closed form (three photopic and three scotopic channel weights) reproduces spectral S/P with a median error of ~0.07 that is time-invariant once the RGB input is chromatically adapted to D65; evaluated in un-adapted sRGB the error instead carries a color-temperature tilt across illuminants (~0.19), so adaptation is the enabling step for this use case. The result generalizes to an independent fifty-scene set (pooled median 0.024; 45/50 scenes within a pre-registered 0.10 band), with the few exceedances concentrated in saturated, spectrally-peaky surfaces that approach the narrowband regime (floral close-ups in this set). The scotopic weight vector is shown to be primary-model dependent, but the value used here is corroborated by a primary-free XYZ projection, and the median error stays within the band across all principled coefficient choices. We do not claim observer-validated appearance fidelity or adequacy on narrowband sources; both are out of scope. Both outcomes follow from the same three-channel projection: it is overwhelmed by spectrally sparse inputs and adequate on spectrally smooth ones.

Alignment between human brain networks and artificial models has become an active research area in vision science and machine learning. A widely adopted approach is identifying "metamers," stimuli physically different yet perceptually equivalent within a system. However, conventional methods lack a direct approach to searching for the human metameric space. Instead, researchers first develop biologically inspired models and then infer about human metamers indirectly by testing whether model metamers also appear as metamers to humans. Here, we propose the Multidimensional Adaptive Metamer Exploration (MAME) framework, enabling direct, high-dimensional exploration of human metameric spaces through online image generation guided by human perceptual feedback. MAME modulates reference images across multiple dimensions based on hierarchical neural network responses, adaptively updating generation parameters according to participants' perceptual discriminability. Using MAME, we successfully measured multidimensional human metameric spaces within a single psychophysical experiment. Experimental results using a biologically plausible CNN model showed that human discrimination sensitivity was lower for metameric images based on Gram-matrix representations derived from low-level CNN features than for those derived from high-level CNN features. The finding suggests a relatively worse alignment between the metameric spaces of humans and the CNN model for low-level processing compared to high-level processing. Counterintuitively, given recent discussions on alignment at higher representational levels, our results highlight the importance of early visual computations in shaping biologically plausible models. Our MAME framework can serve as a future scientific tool for directly investigating the functional organization of human vision.

Understanding and characterizing human color perception is a longstanding research goal. One of the most traditional approaches is looking for the human color discrimination thresholds, the minimum chromatic differences perceptible to human observers. In recent years, deep neural networks have become the standard networks for computer vision tasks. In particular, deep vision encoders, foundation models trained on large-scale visual data, map images into latent feature representations. Despite the widespread use of deep vision encoders, few studies have investigated whether their internal representations exhibit human-like discrimination thresholds. In this work, we present a large-scale exploratory study probing the chromatic sensitivity of more than 50 pretrained vision encoders, including convolutional networks and vision transformers, against human discrimination thresholds. Using controlled chromatic stimuli at multiple chroma levels, we compare model-derived chromatic discrimination thresholds with human discrimination ellipses through a region-overlap metric (mIoU). Our analysis reveals generally weak alignment between model representations and human perceptual thresholds across all model families, with the best mIoU < 0.25. Moreover, we find that self-supervised encoders consistently outperform supervised ones, while language-supervised models show the most polarized behavior, occupying both the top and bottom of the ranking. These findings suggest that human-like chromatic sensitivity does not emerge naturally from current large-scale visual training objectives for any of the analyzed architectures.