What Does a Machine See When It Sees Colour?

Discover AnythingSignupWrite New StoryWhat Does a Machine See When It Sees Colour?byAbdullahbyAbdullah|@navigatingnoiseMachine Learning Engineer at DPDI'm a technical pragmatist who started with broken PCs and now builds ML systems that ship to millions.SubscribeJuly 22nd, 2026TLDR Your browser does not support the audio element.Speed1xVoiceDr. One Ms. Hacker byAbdullah@navigatingnoisebyAbdullah|@navigatingnoiseMachine Learning Engineer at DPDI'm a technical pragmatist who started with broken PCs and now builds ML systems that ship to millions.SubscribeStory's CredibilitybyAbdullah|@navigatingnoiseMachine Learning Engineer at DPDI'm a technical pragmatist who started with broken PCs and now builds ML systems that ship to millions.SubscribeStory's Credibility To understand algorithms that control our digital life, we must first understand how they percieve what we call reality. Everything I write, it is written to draw either a parallel to machine learning, or directly about it. In this series - not really sure how many pieces will fall under it - we will tackle various beliefs and assumptions, short and sweet, with the hope that we either strengthen our understanding or simply revisit what we already know. The series is basically going to be: what is X?This is the first piece in that, and I hope it does not turn out to be complete shite. Rant There is a bit of irony in writing this piece though - I am colorblind. To be specific, I am Deutan. This means I struggle with green-red. In the complete absence of green cones green looks beige and red and orange Brown. Yellow and green appear more red if there is a deficiency. Purple and blue also look similar. But no one better than me to write/rant about colours as well, no? I have often wondered why we have the insane naming convention for colours. Quite often, I fallback to say well why say teal when you can say its blue and green, cuz I can see it is blue and green, why must I remember it is teal? Why should I remember these useless names. Its a color, and its giving blue, and its also giving green, so its from blue-green family, yes I can see why it is not completely blue and yes it is not completely green, but it is still from the blue family, and it is still from the green family. And it is closer to being blue than it is to being green (but thats just me) my comment on the colour ‘Teal’ We humans love breaking things down and giving them names, because it enables higher functionality for us. We have broken colors down to Red, Green, Blue as primary, and then we’ve got secondary colours, and this wasn’t enough so we said hey you know what we want another name and we have Tertiary colours too. To the model that is being trained to name the colours, how is it viewed - better still to ask: how does it discriminate between different colours? But before we start off in that direction, lets first make fun of colours. Understanding Colours First off, what are colours? Colours are simply our eyes percieving the different wavelengths of light, simulating the cone cells in our eyes. Do you realize what this means? It means two people that can percieve the full spectrum can still see the same color differently. We taste the same food differently, we hear the same music differently, and indeed, we see the same colour differently. This is not obvious until you notice how people percieve the world around them, so go out, touch grass, and make friends, and you will truly appreciate the uniquness of each human being. An excellent article from Pavilion I realized this once, then twice, and then again. I come to realize this every now and then, because otherwise it converts into a fact I know and neurons around it don’t really get activated until some conversation has friction around perception - like I would say do you not notice how clean the roads are here versus back home (even if you take the Middle East which is quite clean in comparison to back home, it still has too much dust - I do