Rayleigh Match

The Rayleigh Match was devised by Lord Rayleigh in 1881 as a tool for classifying color vision. It is the color matching method used in Anomaloscopes for red-green CVD. The equivalent for blue-yellow CVD was designed much later and it known as the Moreland Match.

Typically an observer is shown a circular field split into two colors. One of those colors is a monochromatic yellow light (~590 nm), while the other is a dichromatic mixture of red (~679 nm) and green (~545 nm) light. The observer adjusts the Intensity of the monochromatic color and the relative amounts of red and green in the dichromatic color in order to make the two colors appear identical.

Three features of the match are of interest:

• the match midpoint (i.e. the composition of the mixing field),
• the level of the reference yellow, and
• the range of mixtures accepted.