数字农科院2.0

An automated approach to colorize soil maps

文献类型： 外文期刊

作者： Ziming Cheng;Qiuliang Lei;Mingguang Wu;Jiafa Luo

作者机构：

关键词： Color design;Semantic relationship;Soil classification system;Soil hierarchical structure;Soil map color

期刊名称： Catena

ISSN： 0341-8162

年卷期： 2026 年 264 卷

页码：

收录情况： SCIE（2025版）

摘要： Increasingly advanced soil survey techniques urgently require higher efficiency of soil mapping. Color, as a primary visual variable, can effectively encode soil classes and their distributions over space. However, the complexity of the soil maps arising from the multiple levels and classes to be represented makes it challenging to select distinguishable colors for each soil class. To date, methods for automatedly selecting distinguishable colors that align with the hierarchical structure of soil taxonomy remain unknown. In this paper, we propose an automated color selection algorithm for soil maps to clearly represent similarities and differences between soil classes. First, we encode soil classes in multi-levels with three semantic relationships between map colors (i.e., differentiation , association , and sequence ), quantifying the soil map's hierarchical denotative quality. Then, we formulate the soil map color selection as an optimization problem and adaptively generate colors that align with the hierarchical structure of soil taxonomy through heuristic search. To test our method, we conducted a map-reading experiment and a usability survey based on five test maps. The results of the map-reading experiment demonstrate that our method for colorizing soil maps significantly outperforms the expert-based method in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, the usability survey indicates that soil maps colorized using our approach are more favorable compared to those colorized according to the Chinese national standard.

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