In order to investigate the influence of different chromatic backgrounds on the color discrimination characteristics, the psychophysical experiment based on the interleaved staircase method is carried out on the CIE1976L*a*b* plane to obtain the color discrimination thresholds at the five CIE color centers under these five different background colors respectively. Detailed analysis on the fitted discrimination threshold ellipses indicates that the local visual uniformity, as a whole, is stable at the same color centre under different background colors, and the semi-axis ratios of individual chromatic ellipses at different color centers shows similar trends against the hues of background colors. The color discrimination sensitivity is highest when the colors of the center and the background are the same, which implies evidently the crispening effect. For the cases of red and blue centers or of yellow and blue backgrounds, the human color discrimination characteristics are less affected at the red-green direction than the yellow-blue direction.