Building perceptual color maps for visualizing interval data

The roles of hue, saturation and luminance in the construction of color maps for visualization are examined. An exponential luminance component in the color scale insures reliable, highly-sensitive detection of variations in magnitude of the color for Gaussian targets and for low- and high-spatial-frequency Gabor targets. Removing the luminance component insures that high spatial frequency targets will be very difficult to detect, resulting in highly variable, low sensitivity results.