Both physiological and psychological evidences suggest that the human visual system analyze images in neural subsystems tuned to different attributes of the stimulus. Color module and lightness module are such subsystems. Under this general result, a new physical model of trichromatic system has been developed to deal with the color constancy of computer vision. A normal color image is split into two images: the gray scale image and the equal lightness color image for the two modules. Relatively, a two-dimensional descriptor is applied to describe the property of surface reflectance in the equal lightness color image. This description of surface spectral reflectance has the property of color constancy. Image segmentation experiments based on color property of object show that the presented model is effective.