Color Naming

Color naming in the broad sense is giving a color name such as “red” to an object of a particular color. This task is not as trivial as it sounds. We commonly use only a few color names but can distinguish millions of different colors. The colors of an object such as a banana may differ to some extent in all perceptual color dimensions of hue, saturation, and brightness: Parts of the banana may be darker and less saturated because of shading, parts may be more yellow-greenish or more yellow-orangish. Yet we perceive all these different shades of colors as belonging to the same category “yellow” and speak about the “yellow” banana. Color naming thus involves a partitioning of the continuous color space into distinct ...