32-Issue 3

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/181

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Browsing 32-Issue 3 by Subject "Color"

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    Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization
    (The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013) Lin, Sharon; Fortuna, Julie; Kulkarni, Chinmay; Stone, Maureen; Heer, Jeffrey; B. Preim, P. Rheingans, and H. Theisel
    We introduce an algorithm for automatic selection of semantically-resonant colors to represent data (e.g., using blue for data about ''oceans'', or pink for ''love''). Given a set of categorical values and a target color palette, our algorithm matches each data value with a unique color. Values are mapped to colors by collecting representative images, analyzing image color distributions to determine value-color affinity scores, and choosing an optimal assignment. Our affinity score balances the probability of a color with how well it discriminates among data values. A controlled study shows that expert-chosen semantically-resonant colors improve speed on chart reading tasks compared to a standard palette, and that our algorithm selects colors that lead to similar gains. A second study verifies that our algorithm effectively selects colors across a variety of data categories.