Study on full color RGB LED source lighting for general lighting and Improvement of CRI (Color Rendering Index)

The purpose of this study is to check if LED lighting can be used as general lighting and examine the color rendering property of full color RGB LED lighting. CRI is one of the important properties of evaluating lighting. However the present CRI does not fully evaluate LED lightings. Firstly, the performance of a simple task was compared other than comparing CRI values for different lighting. For experimental preparation three types of lightings were used; standard D65 fluorescent tube, general household fluorescent tube, and RGB LED lighting. All three lightings show high error for Purple-Red. All three lightings show similar error for all hues and prove that color discrimination is not affected by the lighting. This proves that LED could be used as general lighting. Secondly, problems of the conventional CIE CRI method are considered and new models are suggested for the new lighting source. Each of the models was evaluated with visual experiment results obtained by the white light matching experiment. The suggested model is based on the CIE CRI method but replaces the color space model by CIELAB, color difference model by CIEDE2000, and chromatic adaptation model by CAT02.