Hue-preserving color blending.

We propose a new perception-guided compositing operator for color blending. The operator maintains the same rules for achromatic compositing as standard operators (such as the over operator), but it modifies the computation of the chromatic channels. Chromatic compositing aims at preserving the hue of the input colors; color continuity is achieved by reducing the saturation of colors that are to change their hue value. The main benefit of hue preservation is that color can be used for proper visual labeling, even under the constraint of transparency rendering or image overlays. Therefore, the visualization of nominal data is improved. Hue-preserving blending can be used in any existing compositing algorithm, and it is particularly useful for volume rendering. The usefulness of hue-preserving blending and its visual characteristics are shown for several examples of volume visualization.