The Design, Based On The Color Chart For Color And Grayscale Images

The lager-scale data, which is created in science and engineering calculation, can be perceived in a more direct way, scientific visualization. Some abstract rules and theories would be much easier to understand in this way. The color plays an extremely vital role in the scientific visualization of the data field, and the choice of colormap directly relates to the effect of scientific visualization. With the popularization of personal computer and the development of digital technology, more and more conference proceedings and journal publications are published in both printed and electronic forms. However, when the electronic publications are printed or copied by a black and white printer, most colormaps are distorted. Several kinds of colormaps are normally used and very popular, but none of them has a good performance in both colorful image and gray image.The aim of this paper is to solve this kind of problems and design effective colormaps for simultaneous colorful and gray image. After analysis of the method to design colormaps, two kinds of new colormaps will be introduced in this paper, and they appears as a monotonic gray variety in printed form and significantly enhances the image resolution when viewed in color. Especially the new one, spiral colormap, is designed to cycle smoothly through a variety of hues with maximum saturation, and the luminance decreases linearly. When viewing only the luminance, the colormap is identical to a linear gray colormap. Moreover, the spiral colormap roughly resembles the familiar and intuitive rainbow colors. All these nice properties simultaneously satisfy the requirement of colorful image and gray image. At last, all these colormaps will be analyzed and compared together, and their advantages and disadvantages will be discussed detailedly.Of course, this paper is not perfect and there are still limitations. A lot of work is needed in the future research of this field.