Followup: "Sorting" colors by distinctiveness

Followup: "Sorting" colors by distinctiveness

"Original Question

If you are given N maximally distant colors (and some associated distance metric), can you come up with a way to sort those colors into some order such that the first M are also reasonably close to being a maximally distinct set?

In other words, given a bunch of distinct colors, come up with an ordering so I can use as many colors as I need starting at the beginning and be reasonably assured that they are all distinct and that nearby colors are also very distinct (e.g., bluish red isn't next to reddish blue).

Randomizing is OK but certainly not optimal.

Clarification: Given some large and visually distinct set of colors (say 256, or 1024), I want to sort them such that when I use the first, say, 16 of them that I get a relatively visually distinct subset of colors. This is equivalent, roughly, to saying I want to sort this list of 1024 so that the closer individual colors are visually, the farther apart they are on the list."

Asked by: Guest | Views: 352

Total answers/comments: 3

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Guest [Entry]

This problem is called color quantization, and has many well known algorithms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quantization I know people who implemented the octree approach to good effect.

Guest [Entry]

"It seems perception is important to you, in that case you might want to consider working with a perceptual color space such as YUV, YCbCr or Lab. Everytime I've used those, they have given me much better results than sRGB alone.

Converting to and from sRGB can be a pain but in your case it could actually make the algorithm simpler and as a bonus it will mostly work for color blinds too!"

Guest [Entry]

N maximally distant colors can be considered a set of well-distributed points in a 3-dimensional (color) space. If you can generate them from a Halton sequence, then any prefix (the first M colors) also consists of well-distributed points.