Abstract
With increasing numbers of flights worldwide and a continuing rise in airport traffic, air-traffic management is faced with a number of challenges. These include monitoring, reporting, planning, and problem analysis of past and current air traffic, e.g., to identify hotspots, minimize delays, or to optimize sector assignments to air-traffic controllers. To cope with these challenges, cyber worlds can be used for interactive visual analysis and analytical reasoning based on aircraft trajectory data. However, with growing data size and complexity, visualization requires high computational efficiency to process that data within real-time constraints. This paper presents a technique for real-time animated visualization of massive trajectory data. It enables (1) interactive spatio-temporal filtering, (2) generic mapping of trajectory attributes to geometric representations and appearance, and (3) real-time rendering within 3D virtual environments such as virtual 3D airport or 3D city models. Different visualization metaphors can be efficiently built upon this technique such as temporal focus+context, density maps, or overview+detail methods. As a general-purpose visualization technique, it can be applied to general 3D and 3+1D trajectory data, e.g., traffic movement data, geo-referenced networks, or spatio-temporal data, and it supports related visual analytics and data mining tasks within cyber worlds.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Akenine-Möller, T., Haines, E., Hoffman, N.: Real-Time Rendering, 3rd edn. A. K. Peters Ltd, Natick (2008)
Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N.: Interactive cluster analysis of diverse types of spatiotemporal data. ACM SIGKDD Explor. Newsl. 11(2), 19–28 (2010)
Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N., Rinzivillo, S., Nanni, M., Pedreschi, D., Giannotti, F.: Interactive visual clustering of large collections of trajectories. In: IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology pp. 3–10 (2009)
Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N., Schumann, H., Tominski, C.: Visualization of trajectory attributes in space-time cube and trajectory wall. In: Cartography from Pole to Pole, pp. 157–163. Springer, New York (2014)
Andrienko, G., et al.: Space, time and visual analytics. Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci. 24(10), 1577–1600 (2010)
Andrienko, N., Andrienko, G.: Exploratory Analysis of Spatial and Temporal Data: A Systematic Approach. Springer, New York (2005)
Andrienko, N., Andrienko, G., Gatalsky, P.: Visual data exploration using space-time cube. In: 21st International Cartographic Conference, pp. 1981–1983 (2003)
Bavoil, L., Sainz, M.: Screen space ambient occlusion. NVIDIA 6 (2008)
Carvalho, A., de Sousa, A.A., Ribeiro, C., Costa, E.: A temporal focus + context visualization model for handling valid-time spatial information. Inf. Vis. 7(3), 265–274 (2008)
Chang, R., Ebert, D., Keim, D.: Introduction to the special issue on interactive computational visual analytics. ACM Trans. Interact. Intell. Syst. (TiiS) 4(1), 3 (2014)
Elmqvist, N., Tsigas, P.: A taxonomy of 3D occlusion management for visualization. IEEE TVCG 14(5), 1095–1109 (2008)
Hägerstrand, T.: What about people in regional science? In: Papers of the Regional Science Association, pp. 7–21 (1970)
Hurter, C., Alligier, R., Gianazza, D., Puechmorel, S., Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N.: Wind parameters extraction from aircraft trajectories. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (2014)
Hurter, C., Conversy, S., Gianazza, D., Telea, A.: Interactive image-based information visualization for aircraft trajectory analysis. Transp. Res. Part C Emerg. Technol. (2014)
Hurter, C., Ersoy, O., Fabrikant, S., Klein, T., Telea, A.: Bundled visualization of dynamic graph and trail data. IEEE TVCG (2013)
Hurter, C., Ersoy, O., Telea, A.: Graph bundling by kernel density estimation. In: Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 31, pp. 865–874. Wiley Online Library (2012)
Hurter, C., Tissoires, B., Conversy, S.: Fromdady: spreading aircraft trajectories across views to support iterative queries. IEEE TVCG 15(6), 1017–1024 (2009)
Kessenich, J., Baldwin, D., Rost, R.: The OpenGL Shading Language Language Version: 4.40 Document Revision 9. The Khronos Group Inc. (2014)
Klein, T., van der Zwan, M., Telea, A.: Dynamic multiscale visualization of flight data. In: VISAPP 2014 (2014)
Kraak, M.J.: The space-time cube revisited from a geovisualization perspective. In: Proceedings of 21st International Cartographic Conference, pp. 10–16 (2003)
Kraak, M.J., Koussoulakou, A.: A visualization environment for the space-time-cube. In: Developments in Spatial Data Handling: 11th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, pp. 189–200. Springer, New York (2005)
Kristensson, P.O., et al.: An evaluation of space time cube representation of spatiotemporal patterns. IEEE TVCG 15(4), 696–702 (2009)
Krone, M., Bidmon, K., Ertl, T.: Gpu-based visualisation of protein secondary structure. In: TPCG’08, pp. 115–122 (2008)
Kveladze, I., Kraak, M.J., van Elzakker, C.P.: A methodological framework for researching the usability of the space-time cube. Cartogr. J. 50(3), 201–210 (2013)
Leung, Y.K., Apperley, M.D.: A review and taxonomy of distortion-oriented presentation techniques. ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. 1(2), 126–160 (1994)
Li, X., Kraak, M.J.: The time wave. a new method of visual exploration of geo-data in time-space. Cartogr. J. 45(3), 193–200 (2008)
Lottes, T.: Fxaa (2009)
Luebke, D.P.: Level of Detail for 3d Graphics. Morgan Kaufmann (2003)
Luft, T., Colditz, C., Deussen, O.: Image enhancement by unsharp masking the depth buffer. ACM Trans. Graph. 25(3), 1206–1213 (2006)
MacEachren, A.M.: How maps work: representation, visualization and design. Guilford Press (1995)
Nienhaus, M., Döllner, J.: Depicting dynamics using principles of visual art and narrations. IEEE CGA 25(3), 40–51 (2005)
Saito, T., Takahashi, T.: Comprehensible rendering of 3-d shapes. ACM SIGGRAPH 24(4), 197–206 (1990)
Scheepens, R., Willems, N., van de Wetering, H., van Wijk, J.J.: Interactive Density Maps for Moving Objects. IEEE CGA 32(1), 56–66 (2012)
Sidharth, T., Hanson, A.: A 3D visualization of multiple time series on maps. In: 14th International Conference Information Visualisation, pp. 336–343 (2010)
Tominski, C., Schulz, H.J.: The great wall of space-time. In: Workshop on Vision, Modeling & Visualization (VMV), pp. 199–206. Eurographics Association (2012)
Tominski, C., Schulze-Wollgast, P., Schumann, H.: 3D information visualization for time dependent data on maps. In: Ninth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV’05), pp. 175–181
Tominski, C., Schumann, H., Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N.: Stacking-based visualization of trajectory attribute data. IEEE TVCG 18(12), 2565–2574 (2012)
Trapp, M., Schmechel, S., Döllner, J.: Interactive rendering of complex 3d-treemaps with a comparative performance evaluations. GRAPP IVAPP 2013, 165–175 (2013)
Ware, C.: Information visualization, vol. 2. Morgan Kaufmann (2000)
Willems, N., van de Wetering, H., van Wijk, J.: Visualization of vessel movements. Computer Graph. Forum 28(3), 959–966 (2009)
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the InnoProfile Transfer research group “4DnDVis”. We also wish to thank Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH for providing the used data set.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Buschmann, S., Trapp, M. & Döllner, J. Animated visualization of spatial–temporal trajectory data for air-traffic analysis. Vis Comput 32, 371–381 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-015-1185-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-015-1185-9