wichmann-lab / psychopy-pixx

Psychophysical experiments with high luminance resolution in Python, using Psychopy and VPixx devices
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
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Feature: "Absolute luminance mode"––calibrate range 0-MAX cd/m^2 #4

Open dekuenstle opened 2 years ago

dekuenstle commented 2 years ago

There are two "philosophical" perspectives on luminance linearization: Should the grey levels 0 to 1 map to the luminance range of the monitor (relative) or to a line through the origin (absolute)?

20221004_132544

Currently, we implement the relative approach, which is more intuitive from a technical perspective and uses the full range of luminance resolution. However, experimentalists are most often interested in contrast differences. For example, a level change of +0.1 and -0.1 should change the luminance by the same (absolute) $cd/m^2$. This absolute luminance calibration should be available as an additional option during calibration.

The implementation is rather easy:

dekuenstle commented 2 years ago

The solution should make use of the stored minimum luminance to calculate correct contrasts, but internally all 8 (or 16) bit should resolution should be used on the range from minimum to maximum luminance.