A Study on the Relationship between Children's Developmental Stages and Sense of Color

It is well known that human sensitivity to color and expressive ability varies with age and gender. In addition, the perception, understanding, and comprehension of color vary according to developmental stage and color-related experiences. This study is one approach to research to clarify the relationship between such "sense of color" as above and the developmental stages of children. In this study, the coloring behavior of teenage subjects; elementary school, junior high school, and university students, to coloring book images were investigated using iPads. The characteristics of coloring and color schemes used in the coloring books were analyzed to explore the relationship with the developmental stages of the children. The coloring book images, mandala-like patterns, used in the investigation were designed originally based on some preliminary investigations. In addition, the original palette of colors systematically arranged in hues and tones was specified to quantitatively analyze the characteristics of the colors used in the coloring book. The results showed that the hues of colors used with high frequency in coloring books changed as the developmental stage progressed and that the range of tones by the combination of saturation and lightness widened. It was also found that the color schemes were simple and easy to understand at younger ages, while the complexity of the color schemes increased as the children grew older

Statistical analysis of human visual impressions on morphological image manipulation of gray scale textures

A method of evaluating human visual impressions of gray scale textures using morphological manipulation is proposed. To study the effects of textural features on human Kansei, we introduced a texture analysis method based on mathematical morphology. Kansei is a Japanese word for sensibility or emotion. Kansei engineering is an approach to connect human sensibility with engineering applications. The proposed method allows us to manipulate global and local properties of a texture separately. Variations of textures were generated by repetitively modifying arranged objects and configurations of the arrangements of original textures. The manipulated textures were presented to human respondents and the similarity of those textures based on human impressions was evaluated. Hierarchical clustering was applied to the similarity matrix generated from respondents' observations. The results of the human evaluation were compared with that of the objective similarity evaluation adopting six global textural features. The global features such as density, regularity, and directionality of the point configurations were shown to have significant effects on human visual impressions and identification of textures. In the case of a texture without significant characteristics in its point configuration, local features such as grain shape have an effect on visual impressions

Influences of Global and Local Features on Eye-Movement Patterns in Visual-Similarity Perception of Synthesized Texture Images

Global and local features are essential for visual-similarity texture perception. Therefore, understanding how people allocate their visual attention when viewing textures with global or local similarity is important. In this work, we investigate the influences of global and local features of a texture on eye-movement patterns and analyze the relationship between eye-movement patterns and visual-similarity selection. First, we synthesized textures by separately controlling global and local textural features through the primitive, grain, and point configuration (PGPC) texture model, a mathematical morphology-based texture model. Second, we conducted an experiment to acquire eye-movement data where participants identified the texture that was highly similar to the standard texture. Experiment data were obtained through an eye-tracker from 60 participants. The collected eye-tracking data were analyzed in terms of three metrics, including total fixation duration in each region of interest (ROI), fixation-point variance in each ROI, and fixation-transfer counts between different ROIs. Analysis results indicated the following. (1) The global and local features of a texture influenced eye-movement patterns. In particular, the texture image that was globally similar to the standard texture contained dispersed fixation points. By contrast, the texture image that was locally similar to the standard texture contained concentrated fixation points. The domination of global and local features influenced the viewers’ similarity choice. (2) The final visual-similarity selection was related to the fixation-transfer count between different ROIs, but not to the fixation time in each ROI. This research also extends the applicability of the mathematical morphology-based texture model to human visual perception