Color and Imaging
Instructor: Gaurav Sharma, University of Rochester
Level: Introductory
Duration: Two 4 hour Sessions with a half hour break. After the class, adjourn to Zoom to join the instructor and other students in a discussion of the class. This class takes place over two days.  
Course Time:

Course Requirement:
The course uses a number of demonstrations of psychophysical effects in color perception that require control of the viewing environment. Participants should plan to take the course in a location where they can turn off lights and exclude external sources of light.

Benefits:
Attendees will be able to:

• Summarize the basic findings from color matching experiments and describe the concept of trichromacy.
• Compute tristimulus values from spectral distributions and transform between commonly used color space representations.
• Describe how color representations relate to the stages of the human visual system.
• Discuss chromatic adaptation and its critical role in color perception.
• Define the concept of a metamer and highlight the distinction between illuminant, observer, and device metamerism.
• Explain the utility of uniform color spaces and color appearance attributes.
• Outline the role that models of color perception play in imaging systems.
• Infer the conceptual basis of commonly encountered color processing functions in imaging systems, such as white balance and gamma correction.

Intended Audience: scientists, engineers, students, and managers involved in the design of color processing algorithms or color imaging systems. Prior familiarity with basics of signal and image processing, in particular Fourier representations, is helpful although not essential for an intuitive understanding.

Course Description:
This 8-hour course provides a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of color perception, measurement, and representation and an overview of how these play a role in modern imaging systems. We begin with a summary of the psychophysics of color: starting from spectral power distributions that form the physical basis of color, proceeding through successive stages of the human visual system, and culminating in the perceptual precepts of hue, saturation, and lightness. Elements of anatomy and physiology involved in these visual system stages are also briefly described in this context. Basic colorimetric and perceptual color representations rooted in the psychophysics of color are developed with a particular focus on the commonly used CIE standards, specifically, the CIEXYZ tristimulus space which is the basis of colorimetry and the CIELAB and CIELUV perceptually uniform color spaces. Chromaticity representations are covered as convenient 2D visualization tools. The course also includes a high level overview of imaging systems that highlights the role played by models of color perception in their design and use.

Gaurav Sharma has more than two and a half decades of experience in the design and optimization of color imaging systems and algorithms that spans employment at the Xerox Innovation Group and his current position as a professor at the University of Rochester in the departments of electrical and computer engineering and computer science. Additionally, he has consulted for several companies on the development of new imaging systems and algorithms. He holds 54 issued patents and has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. He is the editor of the Digital Color Imaging Handbook (CRC Press) and served as the editor-in-chief for the SPIE/IS&T Journal of Electronic Imaging (2011-2015). Sharma is a fellow of IS&T, IEEE, and SPIE.

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