Overlap Removal of Dimensionality Reduction Scatterplot Layouts

Dimensionality Reduction (DR) scatterplot layouts have become a ubiquitous visualization tool for analyzing multidimensional data items with presence in different areas. Despite its popularity, scatterplots suffer from occlusion, especially when markers convey information, making it troublesome for users to estimate items' groups' sizes and, more importantly, potentially obfuscating critical items for the analysis under execution. Different strategies have been devised to address this issue, either producing overlap-free layouts, lacking the powerful capabilities of contemporary DR techniques in uncover interesting data patterns, or eliminating overlaps as a post-processing strategy. Despite the good results of post-processing techniques, the best methods typically expand or distort the scatterplot area, thus reducing markers' size (sometimes) to unreadable dimensions, defeating the purpose of removing overlaps. This paper presents a novel post-processing strategy to remove DR layouts' overlaps that faithfully preserves the original layout's characteristics and markers' sizes. We show that the proposed strategy surpasses the state-of-the-art in overlap removal through an extensive comparative evaluation considering multiple different metrics while it is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude faster for large datasets.Comment: 11 pages and 9 figure

Employing 2D Projections for Fast Visual Exploration of Large Fiber Tracking Data

Fiber tracts detection is an increasingly common technology for diagnosis and also understanding of brain function. Although tools for tracing and presenting brain fibers are advanced, it is still difficult for physicians or students to explore the dataset in 3D due to their intricate topology. In this work we present a visual exploration approach for fiber tracts data aimed at supporting exploration of such data. The work employs a local, precise and fast 2D multidimensional projection technique that allows a large number of fibers to be handled simultaneously and to select groups of bundled fibers for further exploration. In this approach, a DTI feature dataset, including curvature as well as spatial features, is projected on a 2D or 3D view. By handling groups formed in this view, exploration is linked to corresponding brain fibers in object space. The link exists in both directions and fibers selected in object space are also mapped to feature space. Our approach also allows users to modify the projection, controlling and improving, if necessary, the definition of groups of fibers for small and large datasets, due to the local nature of the projection. Compared to other related work, the method presented here is faster for creating visual representations, making it possible to explore complete sets of fibers tracts up to 250K fibers, which was not possible previously. Additionally, the ability to change configuration of the feature space representation adds a high degree of flexibility to the process.Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP