Perceptually Optimized Color Selection for Visualization
This addresses the challenge of visualizing many features clearly for researchers and practitioners in scientific visualization, representing a strong specific gain rather than incremental.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically selecting colors with optimal perceptual contrast for scientific visualization, proposing the Equilibrium Distribution Model (EDM) that achieves significantly better contrast than the Harmonic scheme, handling up to 100 unique features compared to 20.
We propose an approach, called the Equilibrium Distribution Model (EDM), for automatically selecting colors with optimum perceptual contrast for scientific visualization. Given any number of features that need to be emphasized in a visualization task, our approach derives evenly distributed points in the CIELAB color space to assign colors to the features so that the minimum Euclidean Distance among the colors are optimized. Our approach can assign colors with high perceptual contrast even for very high numbers of features, where other color selection methods typically fail. We compare our approach with the widely used Harmonic color selection scheme and demonstrate that while the harmonic scheme can achieve reasonable color contrast for visualizing up to 20 different features, our Equilibrium scheme provides significantly better contrast and achieves perceptible contrast for visualizing even up to 100 unique features.