A new approach to investigate relationships between certain instrumentally measured appearance parameters and their visually perceived equivalents in the automotive industry

摘要

Appearance control has continuously been a major challenge to the automotive industry. In order to implement a consistent control on the appearance of automotive finishes, objective measurement of various appearance attributes such as gloss, distinctness of image, orange peel, etc., is indispensable to the automotive manufacturers. In the present study, attempts were made to find the correlation between visually perceived and instrumentally measured appearance of achromatic automotive finishes. To this end, three physical scales of appearance attributes, namely specular gloss, distinctness of image, and orange peel were prepared using a series of metallic black, metallic gray, metallic silver, and solid white automotive finishes. The samples were visually evaluated by a panel of 16 observers, by utilizing an also prepared lightness scale, in a light cabinet having a 45/0 illumination/observation geometry. The innovative use of a common lightness scale in the present study showed that there is a surprisingly good correlation between instrumentally measured specular gloss, distinctness of image, and Wave scan LW and Wd parameters, and the corresponding visually evaluated data at the four investigated achromatic levels.