A computer system to rate the variety of color in drawings

Abstract

For mental health professionals, art assessment is a usefultool for patient evaluation and diagnosis. Consideration ofvarious color-related elements is important in art assessment.This correlational study introduces the concept of variety ofcolor as a new color-related element of an artwork. This termrepresents a comprehensive use of color, which is a trait that isusually subjectively assessed by a rater's personal knowledge, experience, feeling, and intuition. A sample of children's crayondrawings (N = 52) were evaluated both by human ratersand also by a computer system that rated the variety of colorpresent in each artwork by automatically detecting the numberof colors used and the length of edges between colors.Comparing the human ratings with the computer ratingsshowed a high correlation of the results, leading to a conclusionthat the computer system can be a useful aid for art assessmentby human raters. © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.