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

Abstract

ABSTRACTCreating 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.