Rendering packages such as RADIANCE [1] are used by visual psychophysicists [2-10] to produce complex stimuli for their experiments, tacitly assuming that the simulation results accurately reflect the light-surface interactions of a real scene. By comparing simulation results with their physical real world counterparts we show that RADIANCE can be used to accurately simulate the luminance and colour of real scenes. In the second part of the paper we show, how RADIANCE can be used to study and analyse specific illumination phenomena such as mutual illumination, which is the indirect illumination due to light being reflected by surfaces in a scene. Psychophysical [11, 12] and computational studies [13, 14] have postulated that mutual illumination may provide cues for colour and shape perception.
Alexa I. Ruppertsberg, Marina Bloj, "Colour accuracy in computer simulations for the study of illumination phenomena" in Proc. IS&T CGIV 2006 3rd European Conf. on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision, 2006, pp 448 - 451, https://doi.org/10.2352/CGIV.2006.3.1.art00092