Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging (2012) D. Cunningham and D. House (Editors) Random Discrete Colour Sampling

Figure 1: We present an algorithm that distributes colours randomly using a human-centric definition of randomness. Left: Colours distributed using Matlab’s random-number generator. Middle: Result of our algorithm. Notice that our algorithm does not produce any distinctive patterns. Right: An image similar to one of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings. Apparently-random distributions of colours in a discrete setting have been used by many artists and craftsmen in the past century. Manual colourisation is a tedious and difficult process. Automatic colourisation, on the other hand, tends not to not look ‘random ’ to a human, as randomly-generated clusters and patterns stimulate human perception and break the appearance of randomness. We propose an algorithm that minimises these apparent patterns, making the distribution of colours look as if they have been distributed randomly by a human. We show that our approach is superior to current solutions, especially for small numbers of colours. Our algorithm is easily extendible to non-regular patterns in any coordinate system