Through the lens of color: Relationships between color properties and visual perception of wood (Acer.) figures

The wood figure is a crucial wood trait that contributes to its versatile applications, drawing attention and inspiring imagination. This study aims to elucidate the impact of color attributes on the visual perception of wood figures. Initially, using intelligent methods (interactive color palettes), we colored six typical figures of natural wood (Acer.) as sample images. These images were characterized by entropy values, and assessed by simulated visual saliency (ITTI model) and subjective questionnaires. Finally, we discussed how different color quantities and schemes affect complexity and visual saliency of wood figures. The results indicate that changes in color attributes significantly impact the visual perception of wood figures. When the number of replacement colors is four, both the change rate in image complexity and the mean visual saliency are at their highest, at 24% and 0.335 respectively. Among the colors red, yellow, and green, red tends to influence the intensity of visual saliency more, the subjective complexity of green is higher. In addition, we found that more complex figures are less affected by changes in color attributes, and people can also distinguish the degree of difference between figure types well.