Color Research and Application最新文献

Ivrea is a small city known throughout the world as the home of the Olivetti company. For many years, the innovative urban and architectural experiment inspired and supported by Adriano Olivetti, financed by his company for a large part of the twentieth century, was less well known internationally. His patronage and his far-sighted vision for urban society  have produced results of great relevance in the history of Italian industrialization and Modern Architecture. Since 2018, the architectural assets, the archives, cultural heritage and social experiments, have become part of the UNESCO Catalogue of World Heritage Sites (Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century). Today, many of these heritage buildings, characterized by external surfaces decorated with colored tiles of different types, have several conservation problems, due in many cases to the lack of ordinary maintenance. At the same time, the unavailability of original materials makes the planning of appropriate intervention solutions for maintenance and restoration difficult. This report intends to give an account of this event through two convergent approaches: (i) on the level of method, continually seeking a precise analysis of the materials, trying to refrain from the image of an ‘Olivetti's architecture’ flattened only on rationalist models—chromatically limited—to do justice to a less minimalist vision that has characterized the architectural heritage on matter since its inception; (ii) on the operative level, giving an account of the attempts to recover and restore that “world of colours” that is the Olivetti's city, also with a correct lexical reading of the architectural elements and the finding of materials (an operation declined toward “what can be done today”, given that many original products are unavailable and manufacturers are no longer in activity).

Among more conventional perceptual attributes, such as hue brightness and saturation, color is universally assigned a value along a warm/cool dimension. The source of this aspect of color experience is uncertain and a subject of current debate in color science. An unpublished study from the late twentieth century has recently appeared in an online archive that makes publicly available the results of an extensive set of measurements that document the variation of warm/cool values throughout color space and shows that they relate simply to the sum of the red-green and blue-yellow opponent-color activations (red+yellow vs. blue+green), which the authors suggest is consistent with a sensory basis for this distinction.

Color coding of the graphical user interface (GUI) is effective in cognitive tasks, especially searching and identifying target stimuli from a crowded GUI. The perceived color depth on a flat GUI is a critical feature in mapping the stratification of information. In color science, the visual phenomena of advancing and receding colors provide the perceived depth needed for GUI design. The experiment used a series of color pairs as experimental samples to observe the phenomenon of depth perception caused by colors and obtain the judgment of the perception of color depth. This study developed a best-fit regression model to predict the perceived color depth. The study found that the higher the lightness, the higher the chroma, and the closer the hue is to 33° (reddish color), the colors tend to be the advancing colors; the lower the lightness, the lower the chroma, and the closer the hue is to 213° (blue-greenish color), the colors tend to be the receding colors.

Color choice is an essential aspect of many applications, including graphic design, web design and fashion design. The selection of colors can have a significant impact on the overall aesthetic and appeal of a design, as well as its effectiveness in conveying a particular message or mood. This paper introduces new and simple tools for choosing colors. First, we introduce a convolutional neural network that scores the quality of a set of five colors, called a color theme. Such a network can be used to rate the quality of a new color theme. Second, we propose a method to extract a variable-size palette from an image. The size of the extracted palette can vary depending on the color richness of the image. Third, we demonstrate simple prototypes that apply the trained neural network and the palette extraction method to tasks in graphic design, such as improving existing themes. Our proposed network has the advantage of being significantly simpler than other state-of-the-art methods with better performance.

The complexity of the environment and the richness of landscape color make it difficult to objectively measure color in gardens. However, with the use of machine vision and image processing algorithms, it is now possible to accurately quantify the colors of the built environment through photo recognition, classification, enhancement, and segmentation. This approach can produce correlation intensity charts and hierarchical networks that illustrate theme colors and their associations. To explore this methodology, we have selected Beijing Xiangshan Temple―a traditional Chinese garden and temple with rich landscape colors―as the research object. Using a combination of machine vision image processing technology and color clustering algorithms, we aim to establish a landscape color analysis model based on the Munsell color system and color harmony theory. Ultimately, this will provide a quantifiable and objective reference basis for the design and repair of temple garden colors, with a view to achieving the inheritance and development of classical gardens.

Medical images are commonly used to diagnose and screen various diseases. However, medical images taken by operators with different skill levels have a considerable variation in visual quality. Poor illumination of images increases uncertainty in clinical treatment and lead to the risk of misdiagnosis. This paper proposes a novel bilateral tone-mapped gamma correction to enhance the visual quality of medical images without affecting the natural color quality. First, the proposed tone-mapped gamma correction is employed to enhance the intensity values of poorly illuminated medical images. Then, bilateral enhancement curve adjustment is performed to effectively improve the global luminance content of the input image with features and richer information. The image quality assessment measures like entropy, blind/reference less image spatial quality evaluator, natural image quality evaluator, perception-based image quality evaluator, contrast enhancement based image quality parameter, and color contrast fog density evaluates the superior performance of the proposed technique. The experimental results significantly enhance the intensity difference between dark and bright areas and can aid clinical experts and intelligent health fields.

Color is a central component of human experience, yet when we narrow our focus to the practice of city planning and architecture, color only plays a marginal role in the initial phases of the design process. This paper reviews various approaches to using color on buildings: for example, the evolution of regional styles due to the availability of pigments and materials, the use of color as a form of decorative drapery, and the emphasis of a building's pure form without any additional color. Central to the paper is the analysis of the dichotomy between the reality of the process of actually experiencing a city and its buildings on the one hand and the design process on the other—a dichotomy between reception and production, thus, a contradiction between an “atmospheric world” of human perception and cognition and a professional world of  imaginative design, in which the spatial atmosphere created by color, material, and light often emerges only as a by-product at the end of a conceptual and diagrammatic planning process. The paper proposes a different way of going about the architectural design process that encompasses holistic thinking in color, material, and light right from the start.

This study examines how the use of color in the Japanese urban landscape has changed over time and what the future holds. The colors of contemporary Japanese cities are not beautiful, but it is said that they were harmonious and beautiful in the Edo period (1603–1868). In the 1850s, as the country opened up to the outside world, Western-style architecture was introduced and emerged side by side with Japanese architecture. As economic growth took precedence in the 20th century, there was a lack of awareness of the city's public ownership and the appearance of buildings. The attempt to achieve industrial standards and rapid urbanization were also cited as reasons for the absence of harmony in the built environment. Additionally, many outdoor advertisements appeared. The lack of effective regulations on outdoor advertising is one factor that has heavily affected the contemporary Japanese cityscape. The “Landscape Act,” which went into effect in 2004, aims to regulate landscape color use in present-day Japan. This law allows local governments to enact regulations for urban landscape color use primarily by setting the upper limit for color saturation in terms of Munsell Chroma. It is questionable whether this will really lead to the creation of more unique cityscapes. Training in color in architecture, urban objects, and infrastructure should be compulsory as part of civic education, and more time should be devoted to the subject of color in architects' educational programs to create beautiful cities in the future. Students of architecture need time to think about the idea that the exterior of a building is part of the urban landscape, to consider the importance of color, and to study color harmony.

Over the last four decades, development in the environmental color design field challenged the prevailing designer's attitude towards selecting architectural and urban color palettes. Examining praxiological issues in environmental color design is necessary to reveal influential conditions that can facilitate or obstruct a shift in the design paradigm. This research article presents a qualitative study of environmental color design praxis (ECDP) in urban contexts. The study sought to understand how designers constructed their perspectives on contemporary ECDP, how these perspectives influenced their design approaches and the conditions under which designers can change their attitude and practices in environmental color design. The conceptual model of ECDP emerged from the grounded theory analysis of the interviews with Brisbane designers and the interpretation of relevant texts written by prominent designers and scholars. This article describes the core components of the ECDP model and provides interpretations of how educational, pragmatic and socio-psychological factors influence dynamic changes in ECDP. The underlying research concludes that a holistic understanding of ECDP can inform the advanced and socially responsive environmental color design paradigm; the ECDP model provides a frame of reference for developing color design praxis theory.