Subjective and objective evaluation of the appearance of large surfaces

The visual appearance plays an important role in the quality evaluation of coated yacht surfaces. At the same time the clients' requirements are constantly growing and desired new surface effects and colours bring further challenges for production. The overall appearance of a coated surface is evaluated mostly visually and subjectively. Special measuring procedures are used for the different quality criteria, e.g., colour, gloss, and levelling, but it is not yet succeeded in substituting the subjective evaluation of the appearance. The presently used measuring techniques and evaluation methods, however, are not applicable to large surfaces that are looked at from large distances as it is the case in the inspection of yacht surfaces by the human eye. New methods have to be developed to bring existing testing techniques in line with visual ratings and with measurements of the real coating film surface. Correlation analyses between the visual evaluations of the coated surfaces and the measured data will be carried out. Measuring techniques that seem to have a sufficient potential with regard to the correlation with the visual evaluation should be analyzed with respect to a possible optimization.