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Color Interpolation for Non-Euclidean Color Spaces

Conference Paper · October 2018

DOI: 10.1109/SciVis.2018.8823597

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 Color Interpolation for Non-Euclidean Color Spaces
Max Zeyen* Tobias Post† Hans Hagen‡ James Ahrens§
Los Alamos National University of Kaiserslautern University of Kaiserslautern Los Alamos National Laboratory
Laboratory
University of Kaiserslautern
David Rogers¶ Roxana Bujack||
Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory

A BSTRACT that is built into the human perceptual system to adapt to different
Color interpolation is critical to many applications across a variety viewing conditions. As a result, modern color difference formulas
of domains, like color mapping or image processing. Due to the (e.g. CIEDE1994, CIEDE2000) that were designed to match experi-
characteristics of the human visual system, color spaces whose dis- mental data produce complicated spaces, in which it is difficult to
tance measure is designed to mimic perceptual color differences tend correctly interpolate colors.
to be non-Euclidean. In this setting, a generalization of established
interpolation schemes is not trivial. This paper presents an approach
to generalize linear interpolation to colors for color spaces equipped
with an arbitrary non-Euclidean distance measure. It makes use
of the fact that in Euclidean spaces, a straight line coincides with
the shortest path between two points. Additionally, we provide an
interactive implementation of our method for the CIELAB color
space using the CIEDE2000 distance measure integrated into VTK
and ParaView.
Index Terms: Human-centered computing—Visualization—Visu-
alization techniques—Treemaps; Human-centered computing—
Visualization—Visualization design and evaluation methods
Figure 1: Visualization of hue- Figure 2: From the black
1 I NTRODUCTION superimportance and diminish- node: 1-neighborhood orange,
ing returns. 2-neighborhood green.
Many applications require interpolation between colors, for exam-
ple, color mapping, re-sampling of color images or movies, and
In this paper, we present a novel method for interpolating colors in
image manipulations, like stitching, morphing, or contrast adaption.
arbitrary color spaces equipped with a distance measure. Analogous
The most popular interpolation method is linear, where values are
to the concept of a geodesic in a Riemannian manifold, we use a
taken equidistantly on a straight line connecting the sampling points.
shortest path between the colors to be interpolated with respect to the
However, the state of the art indicates that human color perception
given distance measure, even though its length does generally not
is non-Euclidean due to the principle called hue superimportance,
coincide with the distance between the colors. To be mathematically
Figure 1. Hue superimportance [9] refers to the fact that changes
precise, we require a path-connected metric space. That allows the
in hue are perceived stronger than changes in saturation, Figure 1.
definition of a shortest path even though it might not be unique or
The circumference of a circle of constant luminance and saturation
finite. Furthermore, we provide an open source implementation
would be estimated to measure about 4π for its radius, which can-
of the algorithm in the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) [30, 31] and
not be embedded in a Euclidean plane. In non-Euclidean spaces,
ParaView [1] for the special case of CIELAB color space with the
the concept of a straight line is in general undefined. For the spe-
CIEDE2000 distance measure. We also conduct a parameter study
cial case of Riemannian manifolds, the generalization of a straight
to determine the best resolution and neighborhood with respect to
line is a geodesic, i.e., a shortest path between two points, whose
path lengths and runtime.
length coincides with the points’ distance. Furthermore, human
The main contributions of this paper in a nutshell are:
color perception is also non-Riemannian, due to the principle called
diminishing returns [9], Figure 1. In this context, diminishing returns • Presentation of a novel method for the interpolation of colors
refers to the phenomenon that when presented with two colors, A,C in arbitrary path-connected metric color spaces.
and their perceived middle (average/mixture) B, an observer usually
judges the sum of the perceived differences of each half greater than • Release of open an source implementation of the algorithm in
the difference of the two outer colors ∆(A, B) + ∆(B,C) > ∆(A,C). VTK and ParaView.
This effect is produced by a natural contrast enhancement filter • Optimization of the parameters w.r.t. path length and runtime
through experiments to achieve interactivity.
* e-mail: [email protected]
† e-mail: [email protected] We particularly do not claim that colormaps interpolated in non-
‡ e-mail: [email protected] metric spaces are better than the ones interpolated in Euclidean color
§ e-mail: [email protected] spaces. This could only be evaluated through a user study, which is
¶ e-mail: [email protected] outside the scope of this paper. We simply provide the functionality.
|| e-mail: [email protected]
2 R ELATED W ORK
Guild [6] describes the setup and the results of the colorimetric
experiments that led to the definition of the CIE standard observer.
His seminal paper describes the birth of the first modern color space:
 (a) Naive VTK implementation. (b) Corrected implementation.

Figure 3: VTK’s implementation of adapting midpoint and sharpness

does not trivially expand to our method because it is applied sep-
arately between all intermediate nodes on a shortest path. This
example shows a sharpness of s = 1, which corresponds to constant
interpolation.

CIERGB. It is based on the three primaries from Wright’s experi-

ments [37] and all currently used modern color spaces refer to it.
The goal of the CIE back in those days was to embed all visible
colors into one space to allow unambiguous reproduction of every
possible color sensation. A transformation of CIERGB to CIEXYZ
uses three imaginary primaries, which span the complete visible
spectrum [3, 5]. Later, the CIE’s efforts extended to the search of Figure 4: Average of both path distances and independent path
a color space that would not only hold all colors but also provide distances with respect to the resolution used for computing the paths
a metric that represents the perceived distances between all colors.
This goal resulted in spaces like CIELAB, CIELUV, and CIECAM,
which are transformations of CIEXYZ that approximate perceived
human color differences [13, 14, 16, 22, 28]. 3 A LGORITHM
In Euclidean color spaces, linear interpolation between two colors
Judd [9, 10] defines the concept of an ideal color space as ”a forms a straight line, which corresponds to the shortest path between
three-dimensional array of points, each representing a color, so lo- those two colors. Our method generalizes linear color interpolation
cated that the length of the straight line between any two points to non-Euclidean color spaces using this concept of interpolation
is proportional to the perceived size of the difference between the along a shortest path connecting two colors. We only assume that the
colors represented by the points.” In his papers, he collects evidence space is path-connected and has a distance measure (satisfying posi-
that such an ideal color space cannot exist. He refers to the experi- tivity, symmetry, and identity of indiscernibles) that approximates
ments of MacAdam [17–20], and Helm [7] regarding the principle the perceptually correct distance between any two colors. Through
of diminishing returns, and the Nickerson index of fading [23] re- this notion of distance, it is possible to sample the color space and
garding the principle of hue-superimportance. Their experiments set up a graph with the color distances as weights on the edges. This
all suggest that the perceived color distances cannot be embedded enables us to interpolate between colors by searching a shortest path
in a three-dimensional Euclidean space, but that more complicated on the graph.
mathematical models are needed [26, 29, 33, 34, 36]. Many configurations of placing nodes and edges in different color
In order to encompass the non-Euclidean behavior of human color spaces are possible. In our implementation, we use the RGB color
perception, CIELAB was equipped with other distance measures, space because of its handy cubic shape and because that way, we
like ∆E1994 and ∆E2000 [8, 15, 21]. Many authors agree that a per- can easily guarantee that all graph nodes are within the display’s
ceptually uniform color space should be used to asses the quality gamut. We place the nodes uniformly in all three dimensions, use
of colormaps [11, 12, 24, 27, 39, 41] but there are some problems a 26 connectivity, and allow the user to choose from different res-
with the non-Euclidean distance functions. Due to their construction, olutions and neighborhoods, Figure 2. In addition to its simplicity,
they produce singularities between colors whose hues differ by 180 the uniform grid allows us to compute the graph on the fly while the
degrees and sometimes do not fulfill the triangle inequality, which Dijkstra algorithm runs. Therefore, we do not have to store it, which
mathematically disqualifies them as a metric [32]. On top of this, is crucial for higher resolutions.
it is not easy to imagine a non-Euclidean space. It, and the paths For a practical use in a visualization environment, the interpo-
of colormaps in it, can’t be visualized easily. Further, concepts like lation algorithm must run with an interactive response time. This
linearity, or smoothness of a colormap cannot be defined in these restriction makes choosing a resolution in the order of the colors in
spaces in a straightforward way [4]. To overcome some of these the final colormap (typically 256) computationally prohibitive. To
difficulties, Pant et al. provide a space that is close to the original overcome this problem, we make use of the fact that for small color
distance measure, but is Riemannian [25]. Zerai and Triki [40] ex- differences, the paths in different color spaces do not vary much.
tend the definition of image distortion measures (mean, variance, Especially in our case, the shortest paths of CIELAB’s Euclidean
mean square error) to color images that are defined in a color space ∆E1976 and its non-Euclidean ∆E2000 are similar for small color
that satisfies the properties of a Riemannian manifold. These spaces differences. Therefore, we use the classical linear interpolation of
are often used to describe color in a mathematical setting, as by von the underlying Euclidean space to fill the small gaps between the
Helmholtz [36], Schröedinger [29] and Stiles [38]. On the other node points on the coarser shortest path in the graph. By setting the
hand, Urban et al. [35] take one step back looking for the Euclidean resolution, the users can choose a trade-off between accuracy and
space that most closely approximates its non-Euclidean counterpart. speed depending on the computational resources at their disposal.
The calculation of a shortest color path is implemented in VTK,
We believe that future color spaces will continue to better ap- using a version of Dijkstra’s algorithm is used to find a shortest
proximate human color perception and embrace its complicated path within the graph of discrete RGB colors as explained earlier.
non-Euclidean structure because our computational capacities will One particularity of our path finding algorithm is that the graph is
enable us to work with them despite those difficulties. In this paper, generated on the fly to minimize the algorithm’s memory footprint,
we describe a contribution to that goal that allows interpolation in which can become quite significant for larger graph resolutions (i.e.
non-Euclidean color spaces. > 500 MB).
 (a) Resolution = 2 (b) Resolution = 16

(c) Resolution = 4 (d) Resolution = 32

(e) Resolution = 8 (f) Resolution = 256

Figure 5: Comparison interpolating the same two colors pink and

yellow with increasing graph resolution and a neighborhood of 1.

Once the graph path n0 , ..., nk of k ∈ N+ nodes is calculated, it

is cached and only updated on demand in the VTK implementation (a) Linear Comparison
to achieve a higher run-time performance. To create a colormap
with n > k entries, the path is discretized regularly according to the
relative distances of the nodes on the path. Here, for each of the n
final colormap entries, the closest left and right of the k colors on
the graph path are found and interpolated linearly in CIELAB with
its Euclidean metric. This leads to almost equal distances between
the final colors of the colormap according to the used color distance
measure.
In addition, VTK allows users to set midpoint m ∈ [0, 1] and
sharpness s ∈ [0, 1] parameters for colormaps, changing the way col-
ors are interpolated using a modified Hermite curve. The midpoint
shifts the average between two colors to the left for m < 0.5 or the
right for m > 0.5. The sharpness steers the interpolation between
linear for s = 0 and constant for s = 1. Since VTK applies this
Hermite to each pair of neighboring colors in the colormap, its naive
application to our color path produces false results. We correct the
computation using a generalized Hermite curve. The effect is shown
in Figure 3 using the two colors, pink (R = 180, G = 60,B = 255) (b) Log-log Comparison
and yellow (R = 255, G = 248, B = 42). These same two colors are
used throughout our experiments unless mentioned otherwise. Figure 6: Average path build time based on resolution and neighbor-
hood size.
4 E XPERIMENTS
In this section, we describe the experiments performed to select the
best parameters in terms of path length and path build time. Figure 4 shows that larger neighborhoods generate shorter graph-theoretical
shows that the graph-theoretical path length, i.e., the sum over the path lengths lg despite larger actual path lengths l. That is due to
distances between the colors c(ni ) of consecutive nodes ni the fact that the graph chooses seemingly shorter paths by jump-
k
ing across regions that can be reached only through large detours
lg = by a continuous path. Note that neighborhood 2 with resolution 1
∑ ∆E(c(ni ), c(ni+1 )), (1)
and neighborhood 3 with resolutions 1 and 2 are not represented
i=1
in Figure 4 because the resolutions are too small to fit a full neigh-
is not a good candidate because the principle of diminishing returns borhood and the results are identical to the smaller neighborhoods.
gives a false advantage to coarse paths, i.e., low graph resolution Resolution 256 with neighborhood 3 is missing due to high compute
and small k. A better candidate is the path length in the color space, times. In accordance with the results shown in Figure 4, Figure
5 demonstrates through an example that the interpolation results
k from our method barely change at graph resolutions of 16 or higher.
l= sup ∑ ∆E(c(ti ), c(ti+1 )) (2) The corresponding timing results can be found in Figure 6. The
0=t ,...,t =1
0 n i=1
colormaps with resolution 16 take 0.1s while resolution 32 takes
because the supremum over all possible sample points ti on the path around 1s. Our experiments suggest that the optimal settings w.r.t.
is independent from the resolution of the underlying graph used to build time and interpolation quality are a resolution of 16 and a
generate the path. That makes an unbiased comparison over graphs neighborhood of 1.
of different resolutions possible. For its practical evaluation, we Figure 7 shows two colors linearly interpolated in RGB, HSV,
choose a discrete resolution of 2563 in RGB, includes all graph nodes LAB with CIEDE1976, and LAB with CIEDE2000 color spaces.
of our experiments. The evaluation is performed using a version of The latter was generated using the shortest path from our algorithm
Bresenham’s line drawing algorithm [2]. In our experiments, we from Section 3. The path lengths depicted in Figure 7 demonstrate
construct all possible colormaps of maximal extension in the graph, the fact that our interpolation method achieves the shortest path
i.e., all combinations of color pairs of the corner colors of RGB, and among all tested color interpolation methods.
average the resulting path lengths and build times. Figure 8 visualizes the paths from Figure 7 and the surround-
Figure 4 demonstrates the convergence of the mean path length in ing RGB color space embedded in the CIELAB color space. The
space to the path length in the graph for a neighborhood of 1. It also CIEDE1976 path is as expected a straight line, whereas the RGB
 (a) RGB (path length: 91.438)

(b) HSV (path length: 115.498)

(c) CIEDE1976 (path length: 92.485)

(d) CIEDE2000 (path length:90.156)

Figure 7: Linear interpolation between pink and yellow in four different

color spaces. Path length is measured in CIEDE2000.

path is slightly curved but still follows the CIEDE1976 line closely.
The HSV and CIEDE2000 paths have more extreme deviations. Figure 8: Shortest paths from four different color spaces and the RGB
Whereas the HSV path moves more along the outskirts of the RGB color cube embedded in the CIELAB color space
color space, the CIEDE2000 path moves closer towards its center.
We were able to observe the same behavior with other colors as
well. This phenomenon is in accordance with hue-superimportance
because the human eye perceives desaturated colors as being closer
together than flashier ones. For colormaps with multiple control
(a) CIEDE1976
points, this often results in sharper transitions at these control points,
Figure 9, with the path forming a flower-like pattern.

5 C ONCLUSIONS (b) CIEDE2000

During the course of this paper, we discussed the issues regarding
color interpolation in non-Euclidean color spaces. We presented an Figure 9: Example of our color interpolation method for multiple non-
approach based on shortest paths in graphs with interactive response uniformly distributed control points: {[0.0, (0, 0, 0)], [0.4, (255, 0, 0)],
time and demonstrated it applied to the example of the CIELAB [0.8, (255, 255, 0)], [1.0, (255, 255, 255)]}
color space with the CIEDE2000 distance measure. We conducted
experiments to select the best default parameters and compared the
interpolation results to other commonly used color spaces. Even
though there is no mathematical proof that a unique shortest path
always exists, it did exist in each tested configuration.
In conclusion, our findings show a robust way of interpolating
non-Euclidean path-connected metric color spaces. This makes our
method extremely valuable for color interpolation in future color
spaces with more complex and accurate models of human perception.
As part of our work on this paper, we provide an extension to
VTK for the CIELAB color space with the CIEDE2000 distance
measure, which is now officially available in the current VTK nightly
build. Additionally, our method is integrated through VTK in the
color map editor menu of ParaView and has been available since
the release of version 5.5 (see Figure 10). As determined by our
parameter study, the ParaView version uses a 163 discretized grid
with a one-neighborhood set up in the RGB color space and mapped
over to the CIELAB color space.
In the future, we would like to extend this work to avoid the sharp
transitions at control points through a generalization of the concept Figure 10: Integration of our method in the ParaView nightly build. It
of smoothness to non-Euclidean color spaces. can be chosen in the colormap editor drop down menu as indicated
by the red circle.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was funded by the National Nuclear Security Administra-
tion (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program, Dr. Laura Biven. We would also like to thank Greg Abram for
for production visualization, and by U.S. Department of Energy Of- contributing a resampled version of the meteor impact dataset for
fice of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, through visualization.
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