Using digital cameras to investigate animal colouration: estimating sensor sensitivity functions
By Thomas W. Pike. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2011
88 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Spectrophotometers allow the objective measurement of colour and as a result are rapidly becoming a key piece of equipment in the study of animal colouration; however, they also have some major limitations. For example, they can only record point samples, making it difficult to reconstruct topographical information, and they generally require subjects to be inanimate during measurement. Recently, the use of digital cameras has been explored as an alternative to spectrophotometry. In particular, this allows whole scenes to be captured and objectively converted to animal colour space, providing spatial (and potentially temporal) data that would be unobtainable using spectrophotometry; however, mapping between camera and animal colour spaces requires knowledge of the spectral sensitivity functions of the camera’s sensors. This information is rarely available, and making direct measures of sensor sensitivity can be prohibitively expensive, technically demanding and time-consuming. As a result, various methods have been developed in the engineering and computing sciences that allow sensor sensitivity functions to be estimated using only readily collected data on the camera’s response to a limited number of colour patches of known surface reflectance. Here, I describe the practical application of one such method and demonstrate how it allows the recovery of sensor sensitivities (including in the ultraviolet) with a high enough degree of accuracy to reconstruct whole images in terms of the quantal catches of an animal’s photoreceptors, with calculated values that closely match those determined from spectrophotometric measurements. I discuss the potential for this method to advance our understanding of animal colouration.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Small Animals
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0b8167fb8efdbf626a04e7f59fc46a3e6f46871
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
In Small Animals
Citations in the corpus
- Camouflage through behavior in moths: the role of background matching and disruptive coloration (2015, unknown): “Pike TW. 2011.”
- Color change and camouflage in juvenile shore crabs Carcinus maenas (2014, methodology): “…shown to be a highly accurate approach to quantify visual signals compared with more conventional approaches to model cone catches using reflectance spectrometry, with a very close correspondence between the two approaches in estimating cone catch values (see Stevens and Cuthill, 2006; Pike, 2011).”
- Image calibration and analysis toolbox – a free software suite for objectively measuring reflectance, colour and pattern (2015, methodology): “…has demonstrated that camera RGB measurements can successfully be converted to human LMS cone-catch quanta with polynomial mapping functions (Lovell et al. 2005; Stevens et al. 2007) and to the cone-catch values of non-human animals (Stevens & Cuthill 2006; Pike 2011; Stevens, Lown & Wood 2014b).”