Kansei and colour harmony models for townscape evaluation

Townscape colours have been a main factor in urban development. For townscape colours, keeping colour harmony within the environment is a common goal. Expressing characteristics and impressions of the town in townscape colours are other meaningful goals. The colour planning support system proposed here is intended to improve townscapes. The system offers some colour combination proposals based on three elements: colour harmony, impressions of the townscape, and cost for the change of colours. The objective of the present paper is to construct the colour harmony and Kansei evaluation models that evaluate colour combinations in the colour planning support system. The colour harmony equations by Moon and Spencer are employed for the construction of the colour harmony model. The Kansei model which quantifies the impressions of the townscape, is constructed from the approach of Kansei engineering with neural networks. After the construction, evaluation experiments are conducted for 20 subjects to test the performance of both models. The results of the tests show sufficient correlation between model output and subject response for each model.