Colour in Scientific Visualization

Abstract

Unlike the qualitative use of colour in computer graphics, where the aim is generally to add realism to a scene, in scientific visualization colour is more likely to convey quantitative information. Colour thus acts as an additional degree of freedom, usually used when the three spatial dimensions that we can readily perceive have already been allocated to data. This special requirement to represent numerical data makes it necessary to understand what constitutes colour and how it is perceived, and to have an idea of its potential and limitations.