Effect of observer age and stimulus size on the color matching performance

Abstract The performance of color matching functions (CMFs) is important to color specification and calibration. In comparison to the great number of studies focusing on the effect of primary set, few studies focused on how observer age and field of view (FOV) jointly affected the performance of CMFs. In this study, a color matching experiment with three different primary sets, which were carefully selected based on our previous study, was carried out by two observer age groups under four FOVs (i.e., 2°, 4°, 8°, and 13°). The results suggested that the observer age had a more significant effect than the FOV, and the change of the FOV did not introduce a systematic trend to the color matching results. Neither the CIE 1931 2° nor 1964 10° CMFs were found to accurately characterize the color matches. The CIE 2006 CMFs with the FOV set to the experiment setup also did not have good performance. On average, the CIE 2006 2° CMFs were found to have the best performance, without considering the effects of the observer age and FOV.