Perceptually Optimized Color Selection for Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Equilibrium Distribution Model (EDM), a method for automatically selecting perceptually distinct colors in visualization, outperforming traditional schemes especially with many features.

Contribution

The paper presents EDM, a novel approach that optimizes color contrast by evenly distributing colors in CIELAB space, enabling high contrast for numerous features.

Findings

EDM achieves significantly better perceptual contrast than harmonic schemes.

EDM maintains high contrast for up to 100 features.

Traditional methods struggle beyond 20 features.

Abstract

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.