A Colour Support System for Townscape Based on Kansei and Colour Harmony Models

A townscape has been a main factor in urban-development problems in Japan. In the townscape, keeping harmony with environment is a common goal. But useful and meaningful goals are expressing individuality and impression of the town in the townscape. In this paper, we propose the colour planning support system to improve the townscape. The system finds propositional colour combinations based on three elements, town image, colour harmony, and cost. The targets of this model are mostly townscapes in residential areas that already exist. In this paper, we introduce the construction of a Kansei evaluation model to quantify the impression. First, we conducted computer-based evaluational experiments for 20 subjects using the SD method to clarify the relationship between town image and street colours. We chose 16 adjective words related to town image and prepared 100 colour picture samples for the evaluation. After the experiments, we constructed the model using a neural network for each word. We chose 62 experimental results for the training data of the neural network and 20 results for the testing data. Each colour in the data was selected to have unique hue, brightness or saturation attributes. After the construction, we tested the model for accuracy. We input the testing data into the constructed model and calculated errors between the output from the model and the experimental results. Testing of the model showed that the model worked well for more than 80% of the samples. The model demonstrated influences of colours on the town image.