Abstract

Quantitative evaluation of human sensibility, or "Kansei," has recently attracted much attention. Evaluation of human visual impression is one of the important topics of this area. Most of the conventional studies have applied multivariate statistical analysis for extracting relationships between results of sensory tests and image features. These studies, however, employ subjective words of observers to express human impressions. It is proposed in this paper an objective evaluation method of human impressions based on the logistic discriminant analysis. This method applies the logistic discriminant analysis using various image features for sample images that are already discriminated by sensory tests. An image feature yielding the logistic discrimination model of relatively high fitness to the human discrimination is regarded as that expressing human sensibility more appropriately than other features yielding low fitness. This method employs no subjective words to express human impressions but enables objective comparison of image features with respect to the ability of expressing human sensibility. This method is applied experimentally for exploring image features to describe human visual impressions of black fabrics, which are important resources of formal dress.