Visual Perception of Surfaces
Felicitas Muth, Albrecht Sebald, Wilfried Kunde
In day to day life healthy humans encounter an almost infinite number of colors and their variations. These variations are normally caused either by one of the optical attributes of materials, namely color, gloss, translucency, and texture, or an interplay of multiple of the aforementioned. A common pitfall in manufacturing processes is that despite keeping all optical parameters constant, production-related structural variations in the surface of materials cause a perceived variation in color in the viewer. Consequently, it is difficult to produce two materials which are not only objectively the same but also evoke the impression of sameness in the viewer. As of yet, material probes are assessed by specifically trained evaluators. Common methods are limited to coarse qualitative assessments, however. Therefore, the aim of this project is to introduce a thorough, theory-driven approach to quantify subjectively perceived lightness in relation to objective changes in the surface structure. The project will serve to establish a range of tolerance for production-related noise in the surface structure of synthetic materials of the same color. This range of tolerance will be determined by psychophysical measurements using the method of constant stimuli.
This research is conducted in cooperation with the Süddeutsche Kunststoff-Zentrum (SKZ - https://www.skz.de/de/index.html).
, , , , , . (2021). Lightness perception of structured surfaces. Color Research & Application, 1- 11. doi: 10.1002/col.22740
