On color differences in context

Over the last century, the study of color differences has attracted considerable attention, with numerous attempts to develop increasingly accurate perceptual metrics that, however, have progressed incrementally but never achieved full adequacy. Although research eventually moved from color spaces to appearance spaces, color was still examined without accounting for its surrounding context, even though visual context has long been known to strongly influence chromatic appearance. This work attempts to address the following question: is it meaningful to pursue marginal improvements in color-difference metrics that treat color in isolation, when embedding color within a visual context can produce appearance changes far greater than the precision gained by the most recent formulas? More broadly, is it still appropriate to measure color differences without accounting for their visual context? The results underscore the necessity for the development of a color metric that takes into account the spatial computations of the scene, thereby aligning more closely with the mechanisms of human vision.