Perceived quality of wood images influenced by the skewness of image histogram

Abstract

The shape of image luminance histograms is related to material perception. We investigated how the luminance histogram contributed to improvements in the perceived quality of wood images by examining various natural wood and adhesive vinyl sheets with printed wood grain. In the first experiment, we visually evaluated the perceived quality of wood samples. In addition, we measured the colorimetric parameters of the wood samples and calculated statistics of image luminance. The relationship between visual evaluation scores and image statistics suggested that skewness and kurtosis affected the perceived quality of wood. In the second experiment, we evaluated the perceived quality of wood images with altered luminance skewness and kurtosis using a paired comparison method. Our result suggests that wood images are more realistic if the skewness of the luminance histogram is slightly negative.