Building IoT-based Zero-Contact Experimental Environment for Studying Picture Preference under Various Illumination Conditions

ABSTRACT

We propose a zero contact experiment environment like a living room at home using 'Internet of Things'-based light devices, display and smart-phone or tablet. For our experimental environment, we constructed a large room that has specific lighting systems on the ceiling. For providing a general look-and-feel of living room condition, we also prepared the room with neutral-colored wallpaper and placed the display in the room. Subjects and Experimenters can tap on buttons on the smart-phones or tablets for adjusting the illumination conditions and picture options of the display. Under various illumination conditions, subjects are asked to choose the best preferred picture mode set while watching ten kinds of test images. All these series of our experiments are conducted under no-contact experimental environment thanks to the wireless applications loaded onto the smart-phone, tablet and display. These applications (i) collect the data;(ii) automatically build a dataset;(iii) analyze the data by using machine learning techniques. By employing our system, large datasets that contain participants' preferences for the given display under various illumination conditions are collected safely and easily without risking COVID-19 spread. As a result, after finishing our experiment, most participants, specifically color scientists, praised our zero-contact experimental solution which can be used for other perceptual experimental processes by providing an easy way to build and analyze databases. © 2021 IEEE.