Does Colour Filling-In Account for Colour Perception in Natural Images?

It is popular to attribute the appearance of extended colour fields to a process of filling-in from the differential colour signals at colour edges, where one colour transitions to another. We ask whether such a process can account for the appearance of extended colour fields in natural images. Some form of colour filling-in must underlie the equiluminant colour Craik–O’Brien–Cornsweet effect and the Watercolour Effect, but these effects are too weak to account for the appearance of extended colour fields in natural images. Moreover, the graded colour disappearance effect reported as evidence for colour filling-in does not work under natural viewing conditions. We demonstrate that natural images do not look very colourful when their colour is restricted to edge transitions. Moreover, purely chromatic images with maximally graded (edgeless) transitions look fully colourful. Consequently, we conclude that colour filling-in makes no more than a minor contribution to the appearance of extended colour regions in natural images.