Visualization of Lighting Quality and Object Appearance When Using Multichannel Light Sources

The availability of quasi-monochromatic Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) with peak wavelengths distributed over the visible spectrum has opened the way to the development of multichannel LED light sources generating tunable illumination spectra. As the color appearance of an object is strongly influenced by the spectral power distribution of the light source, these multichannel light sources are also commonly used as a research tool in color quality studies. In a number of studies, spectrum optimization algorithms are applied in order to generate a target spectrum directly. Other papers report on the calculation of an illumination spectrum with the aim to optimize one or a set of general quality metrics such as the luminous efficacy of radiation and the color rendering index R-a or R-f. The approach followed in this paper is to explore and visualize, for a given multichannel LED light source, the lighting quality parameters which can be reached within the chromaticity gamut for a selected object. For any predefined target white point chromaticity, the illumination metamers are calculated analytically within the constraints defined by the multichannel LED light source under consideration. The solution space is sampled with a brute force method and the values of any general or specific color quality index can be evaluated. For a predefined object spectral reflectance (or one typical spectral reflectance representative for a set of objects), the object chromaticity gamut is derived. Several object chromaticity targets within the gamut, such as the memory color of familiar objects, can be selected and the impact of "local" variations of the hue and chroma within this gamut on the general and special lighting quality indices and on the user preference can be checked. This can simplify the selection of an object-based optimum illumination spectrum. The approach is illustrated in practice using a five-channel LED light source which was developed in-house.