A color display model of hyperspectral imagery is proposed, which optimizes high dimensional hyperspectral images nonlinearly into a three-dimensional color space. The property of spectral distance preserving in the model is considered as a main design criterion, and good separability is guaranteed in the
final visualized color images so that the range difference between pixels and the range difference between the spectra are highly correlated. The method consists of four parts: 1) End-members are reduced to a two dimensional space as chromaticity coordinates. 2) Optimization of brightness values in the third dimension maximizes the relevance, thus color labels of each end-member are determined. 3) Linear mixing of colors are implemented in accordance with the various abundance value of each pixel. 4) A local optimization method is used to optimize and correct the color image to achieve color display of the image. Experiments show that the proposed model is feasible as the final color images have good visual quality with spectral distance well preserved and separable. It is suitable for HSI visual display.