PARULA colormap when working with point cloud data

Please what does the colors in PARULA colormap mean when working with point cloud data. I viewed the data using "pcshow" and I want to know what the colors mean or represent. I understand I can change this to JET or WINTER or various colormaps. I made an indept search into matlab and I found information about point intensities but this is not clear enough when this is compared to a tolerance bar when dealing with temperature where you can easily tell that RED indicated a high temperature gradient region.

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

The colors of a colormap do not have any inherent meaning. They are merely scales that cover the range of your data or whatever limits you set. To see the definitions of the colormap that belongs to your data, add a colorbar and optionally, set its limits caxis(limits).

colorbar()

Here's a demo; since I didn't specify color in the 2nd input to pcshow(), the color is scaled according to the z values. Notice that yellow equals 1 and the yellow portion of the data is at z=1.

[x,y,z] = sphere(600);
ph = pcshow([x(:),y(:),z(:)]);
cb = colorbar();
cb.Color = 'w';  % set text to white because the background is black

[Ebube Ezi]

Thank you so much Adam. I've been digging into its meaning and had initially concluded it didn't mean anything except for being a default representation by matlab.

Thank you

[Adam Danz]

Glad I could help sort that out!