Abstract
This paper addresses strategies for the selection of fixed palettes of visually articulated colors. To access a computer's color generating capacity, of whatever magnitude, we need to work within some kind of logical display of its color possibilities. Also, in many display applications, the palette of colors is limited. The usual solution is to span the gamut of the display device with uniformly quantized increments. Since these increments are uniform with respect to the color process rather than with respect to the human visual system, the resulting palettes tend to appear non-uniform. Our approach is to start with a visually efficient color space, the Logical Visual Display, which is a refinement of the Munsell system, with its approximate visual uniform quantization. The orthogonal nature of this space makes it easy to adjust the relative resolution of all dimensions of visually perceived color. The division of our display space into planes of constant equal lightness value is advantageous to color mixing and dithering. Colors thus organized are the basic building blocks necessary for facile specification of communicative color sensation. We have found that there is little computational overhead for using these color palettes, since efficient search strategies, such as binary trees, can be independent of uniform, or symmetrical, incremental quantization.
