Visual comfort is affected by urban colorscape tones in hazy weather

Abstract

People's visual perception and recognition of urban colorscape tones change significantly in hazy weather. Apsychological experiment is conducted in this study to investigate visual comfort related to commercial and residential buildings. Visual observations are performed on the tones of an urban colorscape during hazy weather and air pollution in Harbin, China. Fifty-eight color samples selected through an orthogonal method are evaluated through a Likert scale by 30 subjects in a laboratory setting. Statistical analysis is performed with the maximal information coefficient and Rlanguage. Experimental results show that the changing threshold values of color tones are related to the visual comfort levelsofthesubjects.Theinfluenceofthethreefactorsofcolortonesonvisualcomfortlevel is relatively independent, and the effects of value and chroma contrast on color comfort level are greater than that of hue contrast in hazy weather. Furthermore, the comfort recognition threshold values of color tones in hazy weather are determined through data comparisons and analyses.

Keywords

Hazy weather / Air pollution / Urban colorscape / Color tone / Visualcomfort

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2016 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).