Opponent Process - History

History

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe first studied the physiological effect of opposed colors in his Theory of Colours in 1810. Goethe arranged his color wheel symmetrically, "for the colours diametrically opposed to each other in this diagram are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. Thus, yellow demands purple; orange, blue; red, green; and vice versa: thus again all intermediate gradations reciprocally evoke each other."

Ewald Hering proposed opponent color theory in 1892. He thought that the colors red, yellow, green, and blue are special in that any other color can be described as a mix of them, and that they exist in opposite pairs. That is, either red or green is perceived and never greenish-red; although yellow is a mixture of red and green in the RGB color theory, the eye does not perceive it as such.

In 1957, Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson provided quantitative data for Hering's color opponency theory. Their method was called "hue cancellation". Hue cancellation experiments start with a color (e.g. yellow) and attempt to determine how much of the opponent color (e.g. blue) of one of the starting color's components must be added to eliminate any hint of that component from the starting color (Wolfe, Kluender, & Levi, 2009).

Griggs expanded the concept to reflect a wide range of opponent processes for biological systems in this book Biological Relativity (c) 1967.

In 1970, Richard Solomon expanded Hurvich's general neurological opponent process model to explain emotion, drug addiction, and work motivation. (See Opponent-process theory.)

The opponent color theory can be applied to computer vision and implemented as the "Gaussian color model."