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Storyline visualization techniques have progressed significantly to generate illustrations of complex stories automatically. However, the visual layouts of storylines are not enhanced accordingly despite the improvement in the performance and extension of its application area. Existing methods attempt to achieve several shared optimization goals, such as reducing empty space and minimizing line crossings and wiggles. However, these goals do not always produce optimal results when compared to hand-drawn storylines. We conducted a preliminary study to learn how users translate a narrative into a hand-drawn storyline and check whether the visual elements in hand-drawn illustrations can be mapped back to appropriate narrative contexts. We also compared the hand-drawn storylines with storylines generated by the state-of-the-art methods and found they have significant differences. Our findings led to a design space that summarizes 1) how artists utilize narrative elements and 2) the sequence of actions artists follow to portray expressive and attractive storylines. We developed iStoryline, an authoring tool for integrating high-level user interactions into optimization algorithms and achieving a balance between hand-drawn storylines and automatic layouts. iStoryline allows users to create novel storyline visualizations easily according to their preferences by modifying the automatically generated layouts. The effectiveness and usability of iStoryline are studied with qualitative evaluations.

Delicate attention of the discriminative regions plays a critical role in Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC). Unfortunately, most of the existing attention models perform poorly in FGVC, due to the pivotal limitations in discriminative regions proposing and region-based feature learning. 1) The discriminative regions are predominantly located based on the filter responses over the images, which can not be directly optimized with a performance metric. 2) Existing methods train the region-based feature extractor as a one-hot classification task individually, while neglecting the knowledge from the entire object. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel “Filtration and Distillation Learning” (FDL) model to enhance the region attention of discriminate parts for FGVC. Firstly, a Filtration Learning (FL) method is put forward for discriminative part regions proposing based on the matchability between proposing and predicting. Specifically, we utilize the proposing-predicting matchability as the performance metric of Region Proposal Network (RPN), thus enable a direct optimization of RPN to filtrate most discriminative regions. Go in detail, the object-based feature learning and region-based feature learning are formulated as “teacher” and “student”, which can furnish better supervision for region-based feature learning. Accordingly, our FDL can enhance the region attention effectively, and the overall framework can be trained end-to-end without neither object nor parts annotations. Extensive experiments verify that FDL yields state-of-the-art performance under the same backbone with the most competitive approaches on several FGVC tasks.

We present a family of three interactive Context-Aware Selection Techniques (CAST) for the analysis of large 3D particle datasets. For these datasets, spatial selection is an essential prerequisite to many other analysis tasks. Traditionally, such interactive target selection has been particularly challenging when the data subsets of interest were implicitly defined in the form of complicated structures of thousands of particles. Our new techniques SpaceCast, TraceCast, and PointCast improve usability and speed of spatial selection in point clouds through novel context-aware algorithms. They are able to infer a user's subtle selection intention from gestural input, can deal with complex situations such as partially occluded point clusters or multiple cluster layers, and can all be fine-tuned after the selection interaction has been completed. Together, they provide an effective and efficient tool set for the fast exploratory analysis of large datasets. In addition to presenting Cast, we report on a formal user study that compares our new techniques not only to each other but also to existing state-of-the-art selection methods. Our results show that Cast family members are virtually always faster than existing methods without tradeoffs in accuracy. In addition, qualitative feedback shows that PointCast and TraceCast were strongly favored by our participants for intuitiveness and efficiency.

We survey the state of the art of spatial interfaces for 3D visualization. Interaction techniques are crucial to data visualization processes and the visualization research community has been calling for more research on interaction for years. Yet, research papers focusing on interaction techniques, in particular for 3D visualization purposes, are not always published in visualization venues, sometimes making it challenging to synthesize the latest interaction and visualization results. We therefore introduce a taxonomy of interaction technique for 3D visualization. The taxonomy is organized along two axes: the primary source of input on the one hand and the visualization task they support on the other hand. Surveying the state of the art allows us to highlight specific challenges and missed opportunities for research in 3D visualization. In particular, we call for additional research in: (1) controlling 3D visualization widgets to help scientists better understand their data, (2) 3D interaction techniques for dissemination, which are under‐explored yet show great promise for helping museum and science centers in their mission to share recent knowledge, and (3) developing new measures that move beyond traditional time and errors metrics for evaluating visualizations that include spatial interaction.

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We discuss spatial selection techniques for three‐dimensional datasets. Such 3D spatial selection is fundamental to exploratory data analysis. While 2D selection is efficient for datasets with explicit shapes and structures, it is less efficient for data without such properties. We first propose a new taxonomy of 3D selection techniques, focusing on the amount of control the user has to define the selection volume. We then describe the 3D spatial selection technique Tangible Brush, which gives manual control over the final selection volume. It combines 2D touch with 6‐DOF 3D tangible input to allow users to perform 3D selections in volumetric data. We use touch input to draw a 2D lasso, extruding it to a 3D selection volume based on the motion of a tangible, spatially‐aware tablet. We describe our approach and present its quantitative and qualitative comparison to state‐of‐the‐art structure‐dependent selection. Our results show that, in addition to being dataset‐independent, Tangible Brush is more accurate than existing dataset‐dependent techniques, thus providing a trade‐off between precision and effort.