>Psychtoolbox>PsychGLImageProcessing

[lut, numuniquelevels] = CreatePseudoGrayLUT(nativeBpc)

Create and return a 3 rows by 2^(nativeBpc + 4) columns RGB16 uint16
color lookup table ‘lut’, suitable as lut for the generic LUT based
luminance output formatter of the Psychtoolbox imaging pipeline. This
is a helper function for PsychImaging(), usually not directly called by
user code.

This will setup the pipeline for output of luminance images with about
1786 different levels of perceived luminance on a standard 8 bits per
color channel RGB framebuffer of a standard graphics card. Also supports
more levels on a 10 bpc or 12 bpc framebuffer.

In general, under optimal conditions, for a suitable and well calibrated
display, a luminance precision increase of up to 2.8 bits on top of the
native output precision of the framebuffer and display device should be
possible. However, this has not been verified yet, especially for the higher
bit depths modes.

Usage:

At the beginning of your script, replace the standard …

win = Screen(‘OpenWindow’, screenid, …);

… call by the following commands:

PsychImaging(‘PrepareConfiguration’);
PsychImaging(‘AddTask’, ‘General’, ‘EnablePseudoGrayOutput’);
win = PsychImaging(‘OpenWindow’, screenid, ….);

Further explanation:

The technique to represent 10.7 bits (log2(1786)) of luminance on a 8 bit
display is called “Pseudo Gray” or “Bit-Stealing”. It adds small delta
values to the different color channels to “tilt” the RGB color vector of
each pixel a bit away from the “pure luminance’ axis. This slight tilt,
combined with the different emission characteristics of red, green and
blue monitor phospor and the different sensitivity of the human eye for the
three different colors, will create the perception (or illusion) of extra
luminance values. So far the theory. In practice you’ll need a well
calibrated and gamma corrected color monitor for this to work, and there
may be some smallish color artifacts in your stimuli.

Anyway, this is the “poor man’s solution” to high bitdepths luminance
output, mostly here for illustration and demo purposes. If you need well
controlled high quality high resolution luminance output, check out our
different drivers for different high precision display devices like video
attenuators, the VideoSwitcher, CRS Bits++ box and the AMD/ATI 10 bit
framebuffer driver. See “help PsychImaging” for an overview and usage.

The LUT encoding used here is based solely on the algorithm described at
this webpage by Richard W. Franzen:

http://r0k.us/graphics/pseudoGrey.html\

The webpage refers to multiple different sources of this type of
algorithm, as apparently the principle was described by multiple independent
authors. There is also a reference to the “Bit stealing” technique by:

Tyler C.W., Chan H., Liu L., McBride B. & Kontsevich L.L. (1992)
“Bit-stealing: How to get 1786 or more grey levels from an 8-bit color
monitor”, Proc. SPIE #1666, pp 351-364.

However, i haven’t ever read that article, so i don’t know if it proposes
exactly the same procedure although readers of that article told me that
it is “basically the same”.