Assessment of pedestrian discomfort glare from urban LED lighting

Due to different visual tasks and gaze patterns, the discomfort glare experienced by pedestrians may differ from that experienced by drivers. This paper investigates the discomfort glare experienced by pedestrians under various urban LED luminaires through psychovisual experiments conducted on a test track. The ability of state-of-the-art models to predict the level of discomfort glare, measured on the de Boer rating scale, for this application is also investigated. With one exception, the models all overestimate the mean subjective discomfort glare compared to the experimental data. Models proposed by Lin et al. (2015) and Bullough et al. (2008, 2011) perform well. However, the implementation of these models is not straightforward because choices are needed to estimate some of the variables such as the background luminance and the glare source area.