Visual Coherence for Large-Scale Line-Plot Visualizations

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Date
2011
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Abstract
Displaying a large number of lines within a limited amount of screen space is a task that is common to many different classes of visualization techniques such as time-series visualizations, parallel coordinates, link-node diagrams, and phase-space diagrams. This paper addresses the challenging problems of cluttering and overdraw inherent to such visualizations. We generate a 2x2 tensor field during line rasterization that encodes the distribution of line orientations through each image pixel. Anisotropic diffusion of a noise texture is then used to generate a dense, coherent visualization of line orientation. In order to represent features of different scales, we employ a multi-resolution representation of the tensor field. The resulting technique can easily be applied to a wide variety of line-based visualizations. We demonstrate this for parallel coordinates, a time-series visualization, and a phase-space diagram. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to integrate a focus+context approach by incorporating a second tensor field. Our approach achieves interactive rendering performance for large data sets containing millions of data items, due to its image-based nature and ease of implementation on GPUs. Simulation results from computational fluid dynamics are used to evaluate the performance and usefulness of the proposed method.
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@article{
10.1111:j.1467-8659.2011.01913.x
, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum}, title = {{
Visual Coherence for Large-Scale Line-Plot Visualizations
}}, author = {
Muigg, Philipp
and
Hadwiger, Markus
and
Doleisch, Helmut
and
Gröller, Eduard
}, year = {
2011
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
}, ISSN = {
1467-8659
}, DOI = {
10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.01913.x
} }
Citation