Color brings relief to human vision

In natural scenes, chromatic variations, and the luminance variations that are aligned with them, mainly arise from surfaces such as flowers or painted objects. Pure or near-pure luminance variations, on the other hand, mainly arise from inhomogeneous illumination such as shadows or shading. Here, I provide evidence that knowledge of these color-luminance relationships is built into the machinery of the human visual system. When a pure-luminance grating is added to a differently oriented chromatic grating, the resulting 'plaid' appears to spring into three-dimensional relief, an example of 'shape-from-shading'. By psychophysical measurements, I found that the perception of shape-from-shading in the plaid was triggered when the chromatic and luminance gratings were not aligned, and suppressed when the gratings were aligned. This finding establishes a new role for color vision in determining the three-dimensional structure of an image: one that exploits the natural relationships that exist between color and luminance in the visual world.