Driver's Perception of Images in Automotive Multicolor Display System

LCDs and/or CRTs have widely been used as display devices in the information terminals, ie. GPS navigation systems, installed in automobiles built in 1990s-2000s. However, no method of determining the luminance of color images necessarily meets the visual environment in the automobiles. In order to solve this visual environmental issue, we examined the short-time legibility of the displayed images under comparative low contrast environment, which were mostly important to evaluate the performance of automotive display systems. The experimental results suggested that luminance data, derived from relative visual sensitivity to the multicolor images, were insufficient to realize satisfactory legibility, and that the spatial frequency response and difference threshold of luminance intensity for each color image on a display device were important factors to obtain good performance, rather than the relative visual sensitivity to the multicolor images