The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Theoretical Framework for the Assessment of Continuous Colormaps

A myriad of design rules for what constitutes a "good" colormap can be found in the literature. Some common rules include order, uniformity, and high discriminative power. However, the meaning of many of these terms is often ambiguous or open to interpretation. At times, different authors...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 2018-01, Vol.24 (1), p.923-933
Main Authors: Bujack, Roxana, Turton, Terece L., Samsel, Francesca, Ware, Colin, Rogers, David H., Ahrens, James
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brightness
Collaborative work
Color
colormap
Design of experiments
discriminative power
Image color analysis
Linearity
monotonicity
order
Sensitivity
smoothness
speed
survey
Taxonomy
uniformity
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A myriad of design rules for what constitutes a "good" colormap can be found in the literature. Some common rules include order, uniformity, and high discriminative power. However, the meaning of many of these terms is often ambiguous or open to interpretation. At times, different authors may use the same term to describe different concepts or the same rule is described by varying nomenclature. These ambiguities stand in the way of collaborative work, the design of experiments to assess the characteristics of colormaps, and automated colormap generation. In this paper, we review current and historical guidelines for colormap design. We propose a specified taxonomy and provide unambiguous mathematical definitions for the most common design rules.
ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2017.2743978