© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
R. Shamey, R. G. KuehniPioneers of Color Sciencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30811-1_90

90. Indow, Tarow 1923–2004

Renzo Shamey1   and Rolf G. Kuehni1  
(1)
Color Science and Imaging Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Wilson College of Textiles, Raleigh, NC, USA
 
 
Renzo Shamey (Corresponding author)
Email: rshamey@ncsu.edu
 
Rolf G. Kuehni
Email: rolf_kuehni@ncsu.edu
90.1 Global Structures of the Visual Space
References
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Image courtesy of Robert Hirschler

Tarow Indow was born in Tokyo, Japan, on August 22, 1923. He attended Keio University where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in psychology in 1959, together with an annual award for excellence. While working on his thesis, he had an opportunity to spend some time at Princeton University where he was introduced to the concept of multi-dimensional scaling, a concept he later applied to color stimuli and percepts. He was an instructor at Keio beginning in 1948 and, after obtaining his Ph.D. became a professor of psychology. From 1963 to 1966, he was a research fellow at Harvard University’s Laboratory of Psychophysics under the guidance of S. S. Stevens. During 1971 and 1972, he was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. After returning to Japan, he was a lecturer at Tokyo University. He returned to the USA in 1977 as a professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, from where he retired in 1993. Beginning in 1981, he was also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. After his official retirement, he continued to be an active researcher at UCI until the end of his life [1].

Indow was a member of the executive committee of the International Color Association (AIC) from 1970 to 1981, its president from 1973 to 1979, and in 1989 received the Deane B. Judd-AIC Award for his contributions to color science. In 1986, he was named a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, indicative of his joint interest in both fields, from 1974 until the end of his life. Indow died on September 22, 2004, following hospitalization for a throat and lung disorder [1].

90.1 Global Structures of the Visual Space

Indow had a fascination with the mathematics of psychological findings. Based on extensive research, he published ca. 100 articles and six books in Japanese and in English some 80 articles authored or co-authored by him and three books. His primary interest was in the implicit global structures of the visual space relating to its geometry, as well as of color perceptions. Examples of the former are a 1988 article “On geometrical analysis of global structure of visual space” [2] and his 2004 book “Global Structure of Visual Space [3].”

In regard to color, some typical examples are the 1988 paper “Multidimensional studies of Munsell color solid [4],” “Color differences and principal hue vectors in the Munsell space [5],” and “Estimating physical reflectance spectra from human color matching experiments [6].” How to develop a metric that relates mean perceptual color differences to stimuli, taking into account the various conditions of viewing, surround and illumination, was another problem that fascinated him. Figure 90.1 shows an example of a chromatic diagram of the Munsell hue/chroma plane with the sample placement established by multi-dimensional scaling, with constant chroma samples connected by roughly circular lines and constant hue samples by approximately radial lines [7].
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Fig. 90.1

Example of a chromatic diagram of the Munsell hue/chroma plane