An Artificial Bee Colony-based Algorithm to Automatically Create Colour Schemes for Geovisualizations

ABSTRACT

Creating appropriate colour schemes is challenging for both novice and experienced cartographers. This paper introduces an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to automatically create various colour schemes. Colour scheme creation is treated as a constrained search problem in a continuous colour space. We considered the gamut of the target device and a series of cartographic rules, such as convention, discrimination, contrast, perceptual uniformity and brightness mirror, in the ABC algorithm and presented detailed initialization, fitness definition, local exploration, and global exploration methods for creating qualitative, sequential and diverging colour schemes. The proposed method is evaluated with a case study, and the results indicate that compared with the brute force search method, the proposed method can create satisfying colour schemes of similar quality but significantly improved efficiency.

KEYWORDS:

• Colour
• cartographic rules
• artificial bee colony algorithm
• on-demand mapping

Notes on contributor

Mingguang Wu is currently a professor at the Department of Geographic Information Science, Nanjing Normal University, China. He has a PhD in Geography and Geographic Information Science from the Information Engineering University, China. His professional skills and interests in cartography are symbol design and spatiotemporal mapping.

ORCID

Mingguang Wu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6086-4503

Taisheng Chen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7909-0747

Hong Wang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7451-5467

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [41571433, 41271446, 41571439 and 41201485].