Color Lens: Adaptive Color Scale Optimization for Visual Exploration

Abstract

Abstract-Visualization applications routinely map quantitative attributes to color using color scales. Although color is an effective visualization channel, it is limited by both display hardware and the human visual system. We propose a new interaction technique that overcomes these limitations by dynamically optimizing color scales based on a set of sampling lenses. The technique inspects the lens contents in data space, optimizes the initial color scale, and then renders the contents of the lens to the screen using the modified color scale. We present two prototype implementations of this pipeline and describe several case studies involving both information visualization and image inspection applications. We validate our approach with two mutually linked and complementary user studies comparing the Color Lens with explicit contrast control for visual search.

Temporal distortion for animated transitions

“…The first one is randomly generated. User studies sometimes involve randomly generated data (e.g., synthetic graphs [27] or images [11]) because compared to real-world data, it is easier to describe in a reproductible way, eliminates the problem of selecting unbiased case scenarios -which is challenging when real-world data is very heterogeneous -and allows for better experimental control. Since we do not know of a method for randomly generating structured point cloud transitions, we introduce such a method.…”

Interactive Lenses for Visualization: An Extended Survey

“…Yet, a global visual encoding of the data as a whole can make it difficult to spot details in local regions. The Color Lens [EDF11], for example, adapts the colour coding according to the local conditions underneath the lens. Multiple lenses can be used to create adapted visual representations for different parts of the data, or alternatively, the global view can be replaced by a selected adapted representation temporarily.…”

Visual Analysis of Large Graphs: State‐of‐the‐Art and Future Research Challenges

“…The information is displayed outside the focus region with connectors linking the nodes/cells to their related label. Colour lenses [EDF10] dynamically adapt the colour range of items inside the focus region to better use the screen colour range when mapping values with a very large dynamic to the colour of nodes or matrix cells. Multiple foci: Multiple foci distort several view areas at the same time. It is useful for comparing various parts of the display or focusing on several items that are spread across the view.…”