Color Interpolation for Non-Euclidean Color Spaces

Color interpolation is critical to many applications across a variety of domains, like color mapping or image processing. Due to the characteristics of the human visual system, color spaces whose distance measure is designed to mimic perceptual color differences tend to be non-Euclidean. In this setting, a generalization of established interpolation schemes is not trivial. This paper presents an approach to generalize linear interpolation to colors for color spaces equipped with an arbitrary non-Euclidean distance measure. It makes use of the fact that in Euclidean spaces, a straight line coincides with the shortest path between two points. Additionally, we provide an interactive implementation of our method for the CIELAB color space using the CIEDE2000 distance measure integrated into VTK and ParaView.