Recent evidence suggests that a useful metric of color contrast can be formulated in terms of distance between colors in a perceptually uniform color space. The present research adds to this evidence by presenting equations which relate distance in several spaces to response speeds for reading colored numerals superimposed upon colored backgrounds. The results suggest that several extant uniform color spaces provide no definite advantages over the (nonuniform) 1931 CIE tristimulus space and that improvements can be obtained by rescaling their axes. Two computationally simple metrics are presented which model global color contrast and color contrast complexity.
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