An Information-Theoretical Approach to the Information Capacity and Cost-Effectiveness Evaluation of Color Palettes

Colors are used as effective tools of representing and transferring information. Number of colors in a palette is the direct arbiter of the information conveying capacity. Yet it should be well elaborated, since increasing the entropy by adding colors comes with its cost on decoding. Despite the possible effects upon diverse applications, a methodology for cost-effectiveness evaluation of palettes seems deficient. In this work, this need is being addressed from an information-theoretical perspective, via the articulated metrics and formulae. Besides, the proposed metrics are computed for some developed and known palettes, and observed results are evaluated.