  Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly proposed as models of human
vision, bolstered by their impressive performance on image classification and
object recognition tasks. Yet, the extent to which DNNs capture fundamental
aspects of human vision such as color perception remains unclear. Here, we
develop novel experiments for evaluating the perceptual coherence of color
embeddings in DNNs, and we assess how well these algorithms predict human color
similarity judgments collected via an online survey. We find that
state-of-the-art DNN architectures $-$ including convolutional neural networks
and vision transformers $-$ provide color similarity judgments that strikingly
diverge from human color judgments of (i) images with controlled color
properties, (ii) images generated from online searches, and (iii) real-world
images from the canonical CIFAR-10 dataset. We compare DNN performance against
an interpretable and cognitively plausible model of color perception based on
wavelet decomposition, inspired by foundational theories in computational
neuroscience. While one deep learning model $-$ a convolutional DNN trained on
a style transfer task $-$ captures some aspects of human color perception, our
wavelet algorithm provides more coherent color embeddings that better predict
human color judgments compared to all DNNs we examine. These results hold when
altering the high-level visual task used to train similar DNN architectures
(e.g., image classification versus image segmentation), as well as when
examining the color embeddings of different layers in a given DNN architecture.
These findings break new ground in the effort to analyze the perceptual
representations of machine learning algorithms and to improve their ability to
serve as cognitively plausible models of human vision. Implications for machine
learning, human perception, and embodied cognition are discussed.
