pixels and pictures

As a result of analyzing more than 7000 photos in 21 categories of the online museum collection, it has been pointed out that the proportion of gray is gradually increasing in the world.

 

The most common color among the 7083 items targeted was 'charcoal gray'. Charcoal gray appeared in 80% of the photos surveyed, but in most cases it was in only a few pixels. Here is a diagram showing how the colors of various objects changed over time from 1800 to 2020. One of the points is that gray is increasing while brown and yellow are decreasing. thing. It also shows that highly saturated colors have been used since the 1960s. As an example, many of the 1844 telephones were made of mahogany, so there are a lot of brown and yellow ingredients. Presented as a 2008 phone, the iPhone is mostly gray and black. If you look at the color trends, you can see the trends of 'hidden colors' that you can't understand just by looking at them. Below are images of the 'pocket watch' in the dataset, with blue bands below each image to indicate that each photo contains a small amount of blue pixels. Depending on the watch, there are cases where the hands contain blue, but there are also examples where rust-resistant screws called bluing screws are used, and it is believed that blue was detected. .

Remember internet kerfuffle that was 'the dress' ? Well, there's another optical illusion that's puzzling the internet right now. Behold: the red strawberries that aren't really red. Or more specifically, the image of the strawberries contains no 'red pixels.'

The important distinction to make here is that there is red information in the image (and, crucially, the relationships between colors are preserved). But despite what your eyes might be telling you, there are no pixels that appear at either end of the 'H' axis of the HSV color model. i.e. there is no pixel that, in isolation, would be considered to be red, hence: no 'red pixels' in the image.

 

So it's not that your brain is being tricked into inventing the red information, it's that your brain knows how much emphasis to give this red information, so that colors that it would see as cyan or grey in other contexts are interpreted as red here.

 

As was the case with 'the dress,' it all relates to a concept called color constancy, which relates to the human brain's ability to perceive objects as the same color under different lighting (though in this case there are unambiguous visual cues to what the 'correct' answer is).

 

Antelope Canyon is amazing when visited around (solar) noon time

Bringing black and white photos to life using Colourise.sg — a deep learning colouriser trained with old Singaporean photos.

 

This project has been developed by the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Division, GovTech Singapore.

 

More details in https://blog.data.gov.sg/bringing-black-and-white-photos-to-life-using-colourise-sg-435ae5cc5036 

 

"Have you ever looked at an old black and white photo and wondered: what did the person taking this photo actually see?
Was there something about the arrangement of colours that compelled the photographer to capture this very moment? And if so, did the photographer see something that we — modern day viewers of this black and white photo — are not privy to?"