The dress image has made quite a sensation the last few days.
Being color blind, a blue dress enthusiast, and an image processing guy, I set up to check what was the problem in the image.
The first suspect would be the the RGB monitor we all use. Computer monitors use a silicon LED showing red, green, and blue hues. if the monitor lacks some representation of color it will show the wrong image to different people. but since so many people differ as to this particular image it seems this is not the problem.
Being color blind, I know that I can't see some colors in some settings (it is rare not to see colors at all, but I can`t see violet or red on green), but I think color blindness is not the cause here. I think the culprit is night sight, the ability to see color even in dark settings.
So I set out to find the answer.
A long time ago I concocted a very basic color viewer to show the hue of a picture using hue, saturation and intensity color space. (The initial purpose was to see the color of a blemish on a date fruit.) The image below shows all the pixels of the dress image in a tilted 3D space to show my point. The bottom left side represents black, the top right is white, and the circle of color is apparent. My explanation to the phenomenon is that if you are more of a color person you will see the protruding white and yellow branches of the "tree shape", but if you see better at night you will see the trunk of the "tree" as blue and brown.
