In this study, we used a custom-built Optical See-Through Augmented Reality (OST AR) system to conduct a psychophysical experiment to determine the preferred gamma and black level for high naturalness perception in OST-AR. We utilized 6 different fruit stimuli and 11 different backgrounds to do this experiment. We used two-way ANOVA to analyze the data and concluded that only the effect of different fruits on virtual objects’ gamma preference for high naturalness is considered statistically significant. Surprisingly, all ANOVA analyses indicate background’s color does not contribute to observers’ gamma or black level preference for naturalness. We found that gamma preference has a strong correlation with the average lightness of the virtual stimuli. There is no clear correlation between chroma, hue, and gamma preference in terms of naturalness perception. This finding suggests that the background can be ignored in future imaging pipelines emphasizing high naturalness appearance in Augmented Reality.
Zilong Li, Michael Murdoch, "Improving Naturalness in Transparent Augmented Reality with Image Gamma and Black Level" in Color and Imaging Conference, 2022, pp 147 - 152, https://doi.org/10.2352/CIC.2022.30.1.27