Two psychophysical experiments were carried out to investigate whether or not colour emotion responses would change with the advance of the viewer's age. Two forms of stimuli were used: 30 single colours (for Experiment 1) and 190 colour pairs (for Experiment 2). Four word pairs, warm/cool, heavy/light, active/passive, and like/dislike, were used to assess colour emotion and preference in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, harmonious/disharmonious was also used in addition to the four scales for Experiment 1. A total of 72 Taiwanese observers participated, including 40 (20 young and 20 older) for Experiment 1 and 32 (16 young and 16 older) for Experiment 2. The experimental results show that for single colours, all colour samples were rated as less active, less liked, and cooler for older observers than for young observers. For colour combinations, light colour pairs were rated as less active and cooler for older observers than for young observers; achromatic colour pairs and those consisting of colours in similar chroma were rated as cooler, less liked and less harmonious for older observers than for young observers. The findings may challenge a number of existing theories, including the adaptation mechanism for retaining consistent perception of colour appearance across the lifespan, the modeling of colour emotion based on relative colour appearance values, and the additive approach to prediction of colour‐combination emotion. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2011

Abstract:The effect of cross-regional or cross-cultural differences on color appearance ratings and memory colors of familiar objects was investigated in seven different countries/regions -Belgium, Hungary, Brazil, Colombia, Taiwan, China and Iran. In each region the familiar objects were presented on a calibrated monitor in over 100 different colors to a test panel of observers that were asked to rate the similarity of the presented object color with respect to what they thought the object looks like in reality (memory color). For each object and region the mean observer ratings were modeled by a bivariate Gaussian function. A statistical analysis showed significant (p < 0.001) differences between the region average observers and the global average observer obtained by pooling the data from all regions. However, the effect size of geographical region or culture was found to be small. In fact, the differences between the region average observers and the global average observer were found to of the same magnitude or smaller than the typical within region inter-observer variability. Thus, although statistical differences in color appearance ratings and memory between regions were found, regional impact is not likely to be of practical importance.

The development of wide color gamut (WCG) liquid crystal display (LCD) plays an important role in the high-quality television (TV) field. Nowadays, people want their TV or display devices to have the capability of showing vivid colors while keeping skin colors as natural as they remember. Therefore, it is necessary to develop color-correction technologies for WCG LCD system. A new color-correction method named ''natural skin-color mapping algorithm'' (NSCMA) for WCG LCD is proposed in this study. It can solve the skin-color contour problem in color-corrected images with simple skin-color detection. Its development is based on the concepts of performing color mapping between source hue colors and target hue colors on each hue page. The polynomial regression is also applied to calculate the color mapping conversion matrices. Two color mapping factors called template-size factor and tone-compression factor are designed in NSCMA. The template-size factor is used to adjust target template sizes adequately. The tone-compression factor is designed to control the degrees of image enhancement. For facial skin-color pictures, the appropriate settings of template-size factor and tone-compression factor will get suitable color image rendering on the WCG LCD. It is demonstrated that the WCG LCD can be corrected to show vivid color pictures and keep facial skin colors as natural as possible when the proposed NSCMA is performed.

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An object-to-object color mapping method based on image segmentation is proposed. The pictorial color image is segmented into different object areas with clustered color distributions. Euclidian or Mahalanobis color distance measures, and Bayesian decision rule are introduced to the image segmentation. After the image segmentation, each segmented pixel is projected onto principal component space by Hotelling transform and the color mappings are performed for the principal components to be matched in between the individual objects of original and printed or displayed images. Experiments on the automatic color correction for inkjet prints and color mapping for preferred skin color reproduction are reported. The paper further discusses how the setting of initial seeds points affects the image segmentation results.