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mpetroff

116 karma · joined July 29, 2015

https://mpetroff.net/
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mpetroff··on Changes to accessing and using Geolite2 databases
The Wayback Machine has copies of the last CC BY-SA 4.0 version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191227182209/https://geolite.m...

https://web.archive.org/web/20191227182412/https://geolite.m...

https://web.archive.org/web/20191227182527/https://geolite.m...

https://web.archive.org/web/20191227182816/https://geolite.m...

https://web.archive.org/web/20191227183011/https://geolite.m...

https://web.archive.org/web/20191227183143/https://geolite.m...

And the last copy of the download page before the download links were removed, for reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20191222130401/https://dev.maxmi...

mpetroff··on Turbo, an Improved Rainbow Colormap for Visualization
Including error bands on the plots unfortunately makes them extremely busy and difficult to interpret. The regions of a colormap that are particularly problematic can be seen as dips in the weighted average (except for linear colormaps, where problematic areas are deviations from the "V" shape).

I agree that CAM02-UCS is not necessarily accurate over "long distances." I'm also not completely convinced that using color vision deficiency simulation to shift colors and then using CAM02-UCS to estimate perceptual distance is all that accurate either, but it's the best approach using currently published models. It's my understanding that modern color appearance models were developed using matching experiments, e.g., asking a subject whether or not two colors are the same; for "long distances," it would probably be better to show two color pairs and ask which pair is more similar. If you're interested in how such appearance models have been developed, I'd recommend [1], which is fairly comprehensive (but also quite long).

By my metric and others, I agree that Turbo is certainly better than Jet. For normal color vision, the metric I developed is fairly flat across the colormap for Turbo, which is close to optimal as far as rainbow colormaps are concerned.

[1] Fairchild, Mark D. Color appearance models. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

mpetroff··on Turbo, an Improved Rainbow Colormap for Visualization
Here's an analysis of the colorblind-friendliness of Turbo and other colormaps: https://mpetroff.net/2019/08/discernibility-of-rainbow-color...
mpetroff··on Turbo, an Improved Rainbow Colormap for Visualization
The method presented in Machado et al. (2009) is implemented in Colorspacious [1]. I'm generally in favor of a more quantitative approach than simply running an image through a simulator and looking at it, although as someone who is colorblind, I'm usually biased toward numbers over colors, since I'm less likely to misinterpret them.

I'm not convinced it's actually possible to create a colorblind-friendly rainbow colormap, particularly one without the shortcomings Jet presents for non-colorblind individuals. For all its faults, I find the banding in Jet to sometimes be a redeeming quality, since it makes it easier for me to match part of an image to the colorbar or other parts of the image. For example, in the image included in the blog post of the patio furniture and tree, I find that Turbo makes the tree appear deceptively close, due to my lack of differentiation in the green-orange part of the colormap; while the scene isn't shown with Jet, I suspect that the banding around yellow would make this misinterpretation less likely.

I may take a stab at analyzing the colormap for colorblind-friendliness, if I have time in the next few weeks. While the analysis in Nuñez et al. (2018) works well for sequential colormaps, I don't think it's the most appropriate for a rainbow colormap. For rainbow colormaps, I think the degree to which colors in non-adjacent parts of the colormap can be confused by colorblind individuals needs to be considered (it's the part of interpreting data presented with rainbow colormaps that causes me the most trouble). I'd have to think more about how to best construct a metric to evaluate this.

[1] https://colorspacious.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html...

mpetroff··on Turbo, an Improved Rainbow Colormap for Visualization
While color vision deficiency was considered, I wouldn't go nearly as far as saying that it was a first class citizen in the development of this colormap, which is unfortunate.

Per my reading of the blog post, they ran some images through a random color vision deficiency simulation website and decided that they looked good enough; while lightness plots are displayed for normal color vision, no such plots are shown for simulated color vision deficiency. Also, best I can tell, the simulator they used is based on a 1988 paper [1] instead of more recent and accurate techniques [2].

For an example of where color vision deficiency was actually properly considered for the development of a colormap, see Cividis [3].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1109/38.7759 [2] https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.113 [3] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199239

mpetroff··on Pannellum, a Lightweight Panorama Viewer for the Web
Pannellum supports Google Photo Sphere XMP data, so it should work with any photo sphere without any extra configuration.

Note: I'm the author of Pannellum.

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