Nathan Moroney named IS&T Fellow for color-science contributions

By Jamie Beckett, April 2008

Nathan Moroney, a pioneer in leveraging the Internet for large-scale color science experiments, has been named a fellow of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T), the premier professional imaging science organization. The grade of Fellow is awarded to members for outstanding achievements in imaging science or engineering.

The IS&T recognized Moroney for his contributions to scientific experimentation, practical application and standardization of innovative color imaging technologies.

Online experiments

He is particularly well known for his Web-based color naming experiment, and he is the creator of the online color thesaurus, work designed to help create a natural language for color and provide an alternative to proprietary color-naming systems. He used data from some 25,000 queries to the thesaurus to create an interactive color zeitgeist, a visual representation of color popularity.

In addition to the color naming experiment, Moroney has conducted online experiments in photo quality, color name comparisons and color difference description.

He is also the co-author (with Giordano Beretta) of the popular Mostly Color Perception blog.

Technical contributions

Moroney, who joined HP Labs in 1998, has published more than 25 papers and presentations and holds 11 U.S. patents. He has been an associate editor for the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology and has had conference organization-level responsibilities for numerous technical conferences, including his current role as co-chair of the 2008 IS&T/SID Color Imaging Conference.

His standards contributions included work as technical chair for CIE Division 8 technical committee 8-01, which developed the CIECAM02 color appearance model for color-management applications.

At HP, Moroney was the primary inventor of Real Life Technology for printer local contrast enhancement, and he had sole responsibility for implementing the first generation of Hewlett-Packard inkjet devices using optical sensing for closed-loop color. He is currently a member of the Print Production Automation Lab