Perceptually Optimized Color Maps for Visualizing Large Numbers of Features

We propose an approach, called the Equilibrium Distribution Model (EDM), for automatically selecting colors with optimum perceptual contrast for visualization. Given any number of features that need to be depicted, our approach derives evenly distributed colors in the CIELAB color space to assign to features so that the minimum Euclidean Distance between colors is optimized. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in the context of several visualization examples including 2D and 3D spatial visualizations. Comparisons, using established measures of color contrast, indicate that while other widely-used approaches can achieve reasonable results for smaller numbers of features, our approach achieves perceptible contrast for visualizing up to 100 unique features.