Matching visual induction effects on screens of different size by regularizing a neural field model of color appearance

In the film industry, the same movie is expected to be watched on displays of vastly different sizes, from cinema screens to mobile phones. But visual induction, the perceptual phenomenon by which the appearance of a scene region is affected by its surroundings, will be different for the same image shown on two displays of different dimensions. This presents a practical challenge for the preservation of the artistic intentions of filmmakers, as it can lead to shifts in image appearance between viewing destinations. In this work we show that a neural field model based on the efficient representation principle is able to predict induction effects, and how by regularizing its associated energy functional the model is still able to represent induction but is now invertible. From this we propose a method to pre-process an image in a screen-size dependent way so that its perception, in terms of visual induction, may remain constant across displays of different size. The potential of the method is demonstrated through psychophysical experiments on synthetic images and qualitative examples on natural images.