Color naming models at CHI'12

At CHI'12, the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Jeffrey Heer and Maureen Stone presented a paper on color naming models for color selection, image editing and palette design. It has a good section of the statistical tools for cleaning up a large crowdsourced corpus like the XKCD color naming experiment.

Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2207676.2208547

Abstract: Our ability to reliably name colors provides a link between visual perception and symbolic cognition. In this paper, we investigate how a statistical model of color naming can enable user interfaces to meaningfully mimic this link and support novel interactions. We present a method for constructing a probabilistic model of color naming from a large, unconstrained set of human color name judgments. We describe how the model can be used to map between colors and names and define metrics for color saliency (how reliably a color is named) and color name distance (the similarity between colors based on naming patterns). We then present a series of applications that demonstrate how color naming models can enhance graphical interfaces: a color dictionary & thesaurus, name-based pixel selection methods for image editing, and evaluation aids for color palette design.