Appearance of Object Colors in Dense Fog. Shift of Perceived Munsell Value and Chroma.

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that the visual characteristics of humans are heavily affected by differential visual environments. This paper describes an experiment in which we examined how object colors look like in a dense fog. Seven male subjects with normal color vision contributed to the evaluation of their perception of object colors in the dense fog. The subjects were asked to match the colors of ten standard color cards, as perceived in the dense fog, with Munsell color sheets at hand. The results of our experiment made it clear that the apparent chroma and value tends to reduce with increased density of the fog in any of the color chips. We believe that these experimental results will come to provide useful basic data not merely in the fundamental research relating to the vision but in any such practical aspect as the countermeasures for traffic visual environments in a dense fog.