Color or Luminance Contrast – What Is More Important for Vision?

Abstract

In the framework of a simple analytical model, we quantitatively validate the statement that the “color world” is amenable to much more accurate and faster segmentation than the “gray world”. That results in significant facilitating conditions required for originating indispensable pop-out effect, and, probably, forms the basis of various cognitive phenomena connected with the color vision. Besides, we show that the known (from optics) Rayleigh criterion for separability of two gray objects is considerably softened for objects of different colors.