36 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 36
Item Optimal Axes for Data Value Estimation in Star Coordinates and Radial Axes Plots(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Rubio-Sánchez, Manuel; Lehmann, Dirk J.; Sanchez, Alberto; Rojo-Álvarez, Jose Luis; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonRadial axes plots are projection methods that represent high-dimensional data samples as points on a two-dimensional plane. These techniques define mappings through a set of axis vectors, each associated with a data variable, which users can manipulate interactively to create different plots and analyze data from multiple points of view. However, updating the direction and length of an axis vector is far from trivial. Users must consider the data analysis task, domain knowledge, the directions in which values should increase, the relative importance of each variable, or the correlations between variables, among other factors. Another issue is the difficulty to approximate high-dimensional data values in the two-dimensional visualizations, which can hamper searching for data with particular characteristics, analyzing the most common data values in clusters, inspecting outliers, etc. In this paper we present and analyze several optimization approaches for enhancing radial axes plots regarding their ability to represent high-dimensional data values. The techniques can be used not only to approximate data values with greater accuracy, but also to guide users when updating axis vectors or extending visualizations with new variables, since they can reveal poor choices of axis vectors. The optimal axes can also be included in nonlinear plots. In particular, we show how they can be used within RadViz to assess the quality of a variable ordering. The in-depth analysis carried out is useful for visualization designers developing radial axes techniques, or planning to incorporate axes into other visualization methods.Item Color Nameability Predicts Inference Accuracy in Spatial Visualizations(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Reda, Khairi; Salvi, Amey A.; Gray, Jack; Papka, Michael E.; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonColor encoding is foundational to visualizing quantitative data. Guidelines for colormap design have traditionally emphasized perceptual principles, such as order and uniformity. However, colors also evoke cognitive and linguistic associations whose role in data interpretation remains underexplored. We study how two linguistic factors, name salience and name variation, affect people's ability to draw inferences from spatial visualizations. In two experiments, we found that participants are better at interpreting visualizations when viewing colors with more salient names (e.g., prototypical 'blue', 'yellow', and 'red' over 'teal', 'beige', and 'maroon'). The effect was robust across four visualization types, but was more pronounced in continuous (e.g., smooth geographical maps) than in similar discrete representations (e.g., choropleths). Participants' accuracy also improved as the number of nameable colors increased, although the latter had a less robust effect. Our findings suggest that color nameability is an important design consideration for quantitative colormaps, and may even outweigh traditional perceptual metrics. In particular, we found that the linguistic associations of color are a better predictor of performance than the perceptual properties of those colors. We discuss the implications and outline research opportunities. The data and materials for this study are available at https://osf.io/asb7nItem TourVis: Narrative Visualization of Multi-Stage Bicycle Races(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Díaz, Jose; Fort, Marta; Vázquez, Pere-Pau; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonThere are many multiple-stage racing competitions in various sports such as swimming, running, or cycling. The wide availability of affordable tracking devices facilitates monitoring the position along with the race of all participants, even for non-professional contests. Getting real-time information of contenders is useful but also unleashes the possibility of creating more complex visualization systems that ease the understanding of the behavior of all participants during a simple stage or throughout the whole competition. In this paper we focus on bicycle races, which are highly popular, especially in Europe, being the Tour de France its greatest exponent. Current visualizations from TV broadcasting or real-time tracking websites are useful to understand the current stage status, up to a certain extent. Unfortunately, still no current system exists that visualizes a whole multi-stage contest in such a way that users can interactively explore the relevant events of a single stage (e.g. breakaways, groups, virtual leadership: : :), as well as the full competition. In this paper, we present an interactive system that is useful both for aficionados and professionals to visually analyze the development of multi-stage cycling competitions.Item Implicit Modeling of Patient-Specific Aortic Dissections with Elliptic Fourier Descriptors(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Mistelbauer, Gabriel; Rössl, Christian; Bäumler, Kathrin; Preim, Bernhard; Fleischmann, Dominik; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonAortic dissection is a life-threatening vascular disease characterized by abrupt formation of a new flow channel (false lumen) within the aortic wall. Survivors of the acute phase remain at high risk for late complications, such as aneurysm formation, rupture, and death. Morphologic features of aortic dissection determine not only treatment strategies in the acute phase (surgical vs. endovascular vs. medical), but also modulate the hemodynamics in the false lumen, ultimately responsible for late complications. Accurate description of the true and false lumen, any communications across the dissection membrane separating the two lumina, and blood supply from each lumen to aortic branch vessels is critical for risk prediction. Patient-specific surface representations are also a prerequisite for hemodynamic simulations, but currently require time-consuming manual segmentation of CT data. We present an aortic dissection cross-sectional model that captures the varying aortic anatomy, allowing for reliable measurements and creation of high-quality surface representations. In contrast to the traditional spline-based cross-sectional model, we employ elliptic Fourier descriptors, which allows users to control the accuracy of the cross-sectional contour of a flow channel. We demonstrate (i) how our approach can solve the requirements for generating surface and wall representations of the flow channels, (ii) how any number of communications between flow channels can be specified in a consistent manner, and (iii) how well branches connected to the respective flow channels are handled. Finally, we discuss how our approach is a step forward to an automated generation of surface models for aortic dissections from raw 3D imaging segmentation masks.Item Curve Complexity Heuristic KD-trees for Neighborhood-based Exploration of 3D Curves(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Lu, Yucheng; Cheng, Luyu; Isenberg, Tobias; Fu, Chi-Wing; Chen, Guoning; Liu, Hui; Deussen, Oliver; Wang, Yunhai; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, IvanWe introduce the curve complexity heuristic (CCH), a KD-tree construction strategy for 3D curves, which enables interactive exploration of neighborhoods in dense and large line datasets. It can be applied to searches of k-nearest curves (KNC) as well as radius-nearest curves (RNC). The CCH KD-tree construction consists of two steps: (i) 3D curve decomposition that takes into account curve complexity and (ii) KD-tree construction, which involves a novel splitting and early termination strategy. The obtained KD-tree allows us to improve the speed of existing neighborhood search approaches by at least an order of magnitude (i. e., 28× for KNC and 12× for RNC with 98% accuracy) by considering local curve complexity. We validate this performance with a quantitative evaluation of the quality of search results and computation time. Also, we demonstrate the usefulness of our approach for supporting various applications such as interactive line queries, line opacity optimization, and line abstraction.Item A Motion-guided Interface for Modeling 3D Multi-functional Furniture(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Chen, Minchan; Lau, Manfred; Zhang, Fang-Lue and Eisemann, Elmar and Singh, KaranWhile non-expert 3D design systems are helpful for performing conceptual design, most existing works focused on modeling static objects. However, the 3D modeling interfaces can include more interactions between the user and the models that are dynamic (and can be interacted with). In this paper, we propose a 3D modeling system for the conceptual design of interactable multi-functional furniture. Our contribution is in the design and development of a motion-guided interface. The key idea is that users should create interactable furniture components as if they are interacting with them with their hands. We conducted a preliminary user study to explore users' preferred hand gestures for creating various dynamic furniture components, implemented a 3D modeling system with the preferred gestures as a basis for the motion-guided user interface, and conducted an evaluation user study to demonstrate that our user interface is user-friendly and efficient for novice designers to perform conceptual furniture designs.Item VICE: Visual Identification and Correction of Neural Circuit Errors(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Gonda, Felix; Wang, Xueying; Beyer, Johanna; Hadwiger, Markus; Lichtman, Jeff W.; Pfister, Hanspeter; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonA connectivity graph of neurons at the resolution of single synapses provides scientists with a tool for understanding the nervous system in health and disease. Recent advances in automatic image segmentation and synapse prediction in electron microscopy (EM) datasets of the brain have made reconstructions of neurons possible at the nanometer scale. However, automatic segmentation sometimes struggles to segment large neurons correctly, requiring human effort to proofread its output. General proofreading involves inspecting large volumes to correct segmentation errors at the pixel level, a visually intensive and time-consuming process. This paper presents the design and implementation of an analytics framework that streamlines proofreading, focusing on connectivity-related errors. We accomplish this with automated likely-error detection and synapse clustering that drives the proofreading effort with highly interactive 3D visualizations. In particular, our strategy centers on proofreading the local circuit of a single cell to ensure a basic level of completeness. We demonstrate our framework's utility with a user study and report quantitative and subjective feedback from our users. Overall, users find the framework more efficient for proofreading, understanding evolving graphs, and sharing error correction strategies.Item Hornero: Thunderstorms Characterization using Visual Analytics(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Diehl, Alexandra; Pelorosso, Rodrigo; Ruiz, Juan; Pajarola, Renato; Gröller, M. Eduard; Bruckner, Stefan; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonAnalyzing the evolution of thunderstorms is critical in determining the potential for the development of severe weather events. Existing visualization systems for short-term weather forecasting (nowcasting) allow for basic analysis and prediction of storm developments. However, they lack advanced visual features for efficient decision-making. We developed a visual analytics tool for the detection of hazardous thunderstorms and their characterization, using a visual design centered on a reformulated expert task workflow that includes visual features to overview storms and quickly identify high-impact weather events, a novel storm graph visualization to inspect and analyze the storm structure, as well as a set of interactive views for efficient identification of similar storm cells (known as analogs) in historical data and their use for nowcasting. Our tool was designed with and evaluated by meteorologists and expert forecasters working in short-term operational weather forecasting of severe weather events. Results show that our solution suits the forecasters' workflow. Our visual design is expressive, easy to use, and effective for prompt analysis and quick decision-making in the context of short-range operational weather forecasting.Item Local Extraction of 3D Time-Dependent Vector Field Topology(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Hofmann, Lutz; Sadlo, Filip; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonWe present an approach to local extraction of 3D time-dependent vector field topology. In this concept, Lagrangian coherent structures, which represent the separating manifolds in time-dependent transport, correspond to generalized streak manifolds seeded along hyperbolic path surfaces (HPSs). Instead of expensive and numerically challenging direct computation of the HPSs by intersection of ridges in the forward and backward finite-time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE) fields, our approach employs local extraction of respective candidates in the four-dimensional space-time domain. These candidates are subsequently refined toward the hyperbolic path surfaces, which provides unsteady equivalents of saddle-type critical points, periodic orbits, and bifurcation lines from steady, traditional vector field topology. In contrast to FTLE-based methods, we obtain an explicit geometric representation of the topological skeleton of the flow, which for steady flows coincides with the hyperbolic invariant manifolds of vector field topology. We evaluate our approach on analytical flows, as well as data from computational fluid dynamics, using the FTLE as a ground truth superset, i.e., we also show that FTLE ridges exhibit several types of false positives.Item Visualizing Carotid Blood Flow Simulations for Stroke Prevention(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Eulzer, Pepe; Meuschke, Monique; Klingner, Carsten M.; Lawonn, Kai; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonIn this work, we investigate how concepts from medical flow visualization can be applied to enhance stroke prevention diagnostics. Our focus lies on carotid stenoses, i.e., local narrowings of the major brain-supplying arteries, which are a frequent cause of stroke. Carotid surgery can reduce the stroke risk associated with stenoses, however, the procedure entails risks itself. Therefore, a thorough assessment of each case is necessary. In routine diagnostics, the morphology and hemodynamics of an afflicted vessel are separately analyzed using angiography and sonography, respectively. Blood flow simulations based on computational fluid dynamics could enable the visual integration of hemodynamic and morphological information and provide a higher resolution on relevant parameters. We identify and abstract the tasks involved in the assessment of stenoses and investigate how clinicians could derive relevant insights from carotid blood flow simulations. We adapt and refine a combination of techniques to facilitate this purpose, integrating spatiotemporal navigation, dimensional reduction, and contextual embedding. We evaluated and discussed our approach with an interdisciplinary group of medical practitioners, fluid simulation and flow visualization researchers. Our initial findings indicate that visualization techniques could promote usage of carotid blood flow simulations in practice.