Improving pedestrians’ navigation safety at night by enhancing legibility of foreground and background information on the display

Traffic intersections are dangerous areas for pedestrians at night, primarily when people use their mobile phones while walking; pedestrians’ line of sight switches between their phones and the environment, which causes inattentional blindness during emergencies. The salience of the foreground and background information is different by the lightness conditions; therefore, identifying the lightness level of the foreground and background is critical. In this study, the brightness of urban traffic intersection scenes in the nighttime was analyzed, and improved color tones of the navigation interface for enhancing information recognition were identified. Moreover, identify the balance of visual attention by adjusting lightness and color treatment between foreground and background information. A glance legibility experiment indicated that a warm color tone with contrast and gamma correction under a lighting value of 65 in the LAB color mode is the optimal recognition combination. The results of this study indicated that low gamma under high lighting effectively reduced glare-related distractions and resulted in the lowest error rate in background information recognition. This paper proposes increasing the visual attention of urban pedestrians during nighttime navigation through the balancing of the lighting of the foreground interface and the color treatment of the background. Navigating at nighttime can be safer when their attention toward the environment increases and decreases attention distraction.     

Sensitive-by-distance: quasi-health data in the algorithmic era

This article offers a new perspective on the boundaries between health and non-health data in the age of ‘Quantified-Self’ apps: the ‘data-sensitiveness-by-computational-distance’ approach-or, more simply, the ‘sensitive-by-distance’ approach. This approach takes into account two variables: the intrinsic sensitiveness (a static variable) of personal data and the computational distance (a dynamic variable) between some kinds of personal data and pure health (or sensitive) data, which depends upon computational capacity. From an objective perspective, computational capacity depends on the level of development of data retrieval technologies at a certain moment, the availability of ‘accessory data’, and the applicable legal restraints on processing data. From a subjective perspective, computational capacity depends on the specific data mining efforts (or the ability to invest in them) taken by a given data controller: economic resources, human resources, and the use of accessory data. A direct consequence of the expansion of augmented humanity in collecting and inferring personal data is the increasing loss of health data processing ‘legibility’ for data subjects. In order to address this issue, we propose exploiting the existing legal tools in the General Data Protection Regulation to empower data subjects (the right to data access, the right to know the logic involved in automated decision-making, data portability, etc.).     

Surface treatment,reflectance, and age effects on electronic‐paper reading performance

Abstract— This study is intended to explore the legibility and visual fatigue of different age users under various surface treatments and reflectance of electronic paper. Through the method of character‐search task, the results indicated that compared with single types of treatment [anti‐reflection (AR) 0.8%, anti‐glare, 43% haze), the compound treatment of anti‐reflection and anti‐glare (ARC) exhibited the same legibility, and it showed superior properties to effectively reduce visual fatigue. Hence, it is suggested that electronic‐paper manufacturers should choose the compound surface treatment for better visual performance. On the other hand, the findings also validated that enhancing the reflectance of electronic paper to the same level as regular paper (about 80%) is worthy to be practically implemented. Based on the results of this study, electronic‐paper manufacturers can take useful information to fulfill ergonomic requirements on product design.     

Ergonomic evaluation of electronic paper: Influences of anti‐reflection surface treatment,illumination, and curvature on legibility and visual fatigue

Abstract— The intent of this study is to investigate some critical factors that affect legibility and visual fatigue while reading on an electronic‐paper display in terms of ergonomics. Anti‐reflection surface treatment, ambient illumination, and bending curvature are taken into account to evaluate their effects by using the method of letter‐search task. The results showed that the surface treatment with high degrees of anti‐reflection significantly improved the legibility and reduces visual fatigue. Thus, electronic‐paper manufacturers may choose a much better surface treatment in order to meet ergonomic demand. In addition, the findings in the present study also indicate that subjects reported less visual fatigue on a bending surface of a visual display unit, in comparison with a plane surface. It is proven that these ergonomic evaluations for electronic paper provide manufactures with useful information to design suitable products for users.     

Handwriting style classification

This paper describes an independent handwriting style classifier that has been designed to select the best recognizer for a given style of writing. For this purpose a definition of handwriting legibility has been defined and a method implemented that can predict this legibility. The technique consists of two phases. In the feature-extraction phase, a set of 36 features is extracted from the image contour. In the classification phase, two nonparametric classification techniques are applied to the extracted features in order to compare their effectiveness in classifying words into legible, illegible, and middle classes. In the first method, a multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) is used to transform the space of extracted features (36 dimensions) into an optimal discriminant space for a nearest mean based classifier. In the second method, a probabilistic neural network (PNN) based on the Bayes strategy and nonparametric estimation of probability density function is used. The experimental results show that the PNN method gives superior classification results when compared with the MDA method. For the legible, illegible, and middle handwriting the method provides 86.5% (legible/illegible), 65.5% (legible/middle), and 90.5% (middle/illegible) correct classification for two classes. For the three-class legibility classification the rate of correct classification is 67.33% using a PNN classifier.Received: 6 September 2002, Accepted: 19 September 2002, Published online: 6 June 2003     

老年人食品包装的易用性设计

老年人食品包装设计未能充分考虑老年人生理和心理上的特殊需求,一般存在难以识别及难以开启等问题。设计师在进行老年人食品的包装设计时,可采用去繁求简、整合设计的方式,使用简单的图形化语言,将零散的信息重组,强化重要信息,设计出老年人易于读取的开口方式,提高包装的易读性;运用提示性设计,在商品包装上有效传达食用方法等说明性文字信息,提升包装的易识别性;对包装结构进行整合,将复杂的结构简单化,强化重要且重复使用的功能结构,突出包装的易拿取性。同时,可在包装中运用符合老年人心理需求的中国传统图案、代表健康长寿的吉祥图案,以及老年人喜爱的＂百子图＂图案等,使老年人形成一种健康、积极乐观的心理暗示。     

Optimization by colour representation of a twisted nematic display system for car application

Several means are proposed for improving the representation of coloured information by twisted nematic LCDs in the transflective negative contrast mode, which are well suited for automotive application. In order to optimize the optical appearance of such display systems we analyse the spectral and spatial properties if the residual off-transmission and its implications for the perceived contrast. An appropriate adjusting of cell parameters, proper choice of accessories and the use of dichroic dyes allow spectral matching of cell and light source and thus improve contrast.     

Is interlace refresh a practical method for reducing VDU flicker?

Tests were conducted to discover whether interlacing of successive lines in VDUs (with ‘fast’ phosphors and bright backgrounds) is a visually acceptable technique for reducing the bandwidth of the display's electronic circuitry. The experiments show that interlacing, compared to non-interlaced refresh, introduces several new types of interference in the visual channel of the observer, which can only be removed by using image repetition frequencies ? 50/100 Hz (full/half rame), and by increasing the line density to a value beyond that which is needed for the generation of 9 × 7 alphanumeric characters. The net reduction in bandwidths is thus only by a factor of 0.83 if all types of visual interference are to be removed at observing distances of greater than 0.3 m for line densities less than 3.4 lines per millimetre.     

Evaluation and optimization by colorimetry of polarizers for liquid crystal display

This paper describes the development of useful polarizers for LCD application, their optimization and evaluation based on colorimetry. Figures of merit are suggested for the characterization of LCDs and polarizers using this technique. More than 50 polarizers were used in the experiment, which also evaluated their use for both twisted nematic black-and-white LCDs and guest-host colour LCDs. Their optical properties and the associated display legibility were shown to be best exprssed colorimetrically.