Making Things Visible: Opportunities and Tensions in Visual Approaches for Design Research and Practice

Visual approaches for conducting research during the design process often give voice to people and ideas that might otherwise remain obscured. Recent and increasing interest in visual research techniques has coincided with technological advances such as camera phones and visually oriented mobile applications. As a result of this close association between digital technologies and image-based research techniques, there are multiple opportunities and challenges within human–computer interaction (HCI) design practice to employ these strategies to improve user experiences. This article provides an overview of current visual approaches to research highlighting the role technology has played in facilitating and inspiring these techniques. A series of case studies are presented that provide a basis for understanding a breadth of visual approaches in HCI design practices as well as serve as a point of entry to a critical and reflective discussion about the use of these approaches in different circumstances. Based on these reflections, three value statements are offered as a means to encourage the use of these visual approaches more broadly and critically in HCI design studies.     

A psychophysical approach to assessing the quality of antialiasedimages

The assumption that antialiasing destroys useful visual information about object features is challenged in three experiments that examine the effects of antialiasing on the visual information for object location and motion. The results show that proper antialiasing eliminates the spurious visual information produced by sampling processes in image synthesis and allows the viewer's visual system to produce a precise representation of object location and a continuous representation of object motion. This suggests that in designing imagery systems, simply increasing the spatial and temporal addressability and resolution beyond limits set by the human visual system will have a negligible impact on image quality, but that effective use of antialiasing techniques could allow visual information about object features to be presented with great fidelity     

Comparison of stochastic filtering methods for 3D tracking

In the recent years, the 3D visual research has gained momentum with publications appearing for all aspects of 3D including visual tracking. This paper presents a review of the literature published for 3D visual tracking over the past five years. The work particularly focuses on stochastic filtering techniques such as particle filter and Kalman filter. These two filters are extensively used for tracking due to their ability to consider uncertainties in the estimation. The improvement in computational power of computers and increasing interest in robust tracking algorithms lead to increase in the use of stochastic filters in visual tracking in general and 3D visual tracking in particular. Stochastic filters are used for numerous applications in the literature such as robot navigation, computer games and behavior analysis. Kalman filter is a linear estimator which approximates system's dynamics with Gaussian model while particle filter approximates system's dynamics using weighted samples. In this paper, we investigate the implementation of Kalman and particle filters in the published work and we provide comparison between these techniques qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The quantitative analysis is in terms of computational time and accuracy. The quantitative analysis has been implemented using four parameters of the tracked object which are object position, velocity, size of bounding ellipse and orientation angle.     

Multi-User Collaborative Assembly Planning over the Internet

1 Introduction Assembly planning is an important issue of product design for assembly, and many achievements have been obtained. Techniques such as geometric reasoning [1,2], genetic algorithms (GA) [3], virtual assembly [4,5] and so on are employed to assembly planning of relatively simple products successfully. But for the more complex cases, there is a combinational complexity problem when the geometric reasoning method is used. The fitness function in GA cannot take into account various…     

Multi-User Collaborative Assembly Planning over the Internet

Due to the increasing complexity of products and for the distributed product development, more closely collaborative work among designers is required. A collaborative assembly planning approach is proposed to support assembly planning in a networked environment. The working procedure is depicted and the key techniques including collaborative-planning-oriented assembly decomposition modeling, assembly assignment modeling, and sub-plans merging are addressed. By incorporating visual models at client side with assembly application models at server side, a web-based supporting environment for collaborative assembly planning has been developed using VRML and Java-EAI techniques. A case study is given to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the idea.     

城市道路交通数据可视分析综述

目的 交通是困扰现代大都市的世界性难题.近年来,可视分析技术在分析和利用交通大数据中扮演了越来越重要的角色,成为一项重要的智能交通技术.本文将全面回顾自信息可视化和可视分析兴起以来城市交通数据可视分析领域的研究现状.方法 从道路交通流量分析和其他交通问题分析两个方面,按照数据的类型及问题的分类探讨交通领域的可视化技术和可视分析系统,简单回顾近年来出现的研究新趋势.结果 早期研究注重对道路流量的可视化展示方案,主要方法有箭头图、马赛克图和轨迹墙等.随着可视分析手段的丰富,对城市道路交通流量的分析层次上升到交通事件层面,但是交通事件的定义仅局限于交通拥堵.应用可视分析的其他交通问题领域包括公共交通、交通事故和人群出行行为等.近年出现了挖掘和利用交通轨迹或交通事件的社会属性或称环境上下文信息的研究新趋势.结论 从对交通流量的可视化到交通事件的可视分析,从面向道路交通状况到与交通相关的其他社会性问题,从单纯反映路况的交通数据到富含社会性语义的多源数据,从传统的PC端可视化和交互范式到新型的可视化展示介质,交通数据可视化领域的研究在深度和广度上都得到大大拓展,未来该领域的研究趋势也体现于其中.     

Recent advances in visual and infrared face recognition—a review

Face recognition is a rapidly growing research area due to increasing demands for security in commercial and law enforcement applications. This paper provides an up-to-date review of research efforts in face recognition techniques based on two-dimensional (2D) images in the visual and infrared (IR) spectra. Face recognition systems based on visual images have reached a significant level of maturity with some practical success. However, the performance of visual face recognition may degrade under poor illumination conditions or for subjects of various skin colors. IR imagery represents a viable alternative to visible imaging in the search for a robust and practical identification system. While visual face recognition systems perform relatively reliably under controlled illumination conditions, thermal IR face recognition systems are advantageous when there is no control over illumination or for detecting disguised faces. Face recognition using 3D images is another active area of face recognition, which provides robust face recognition with changes in pose. Recent research has also demonstrated that the fusion of different imaging modalities and spectral components can improve the overall performance of face recognition.     

Designing pixel-oriented visualization techniques: theory andapplications

Visualization techniques are of increasing importance in exploring and analyzing large amounts of multidimensional information. One important class of visualization techniques which is particularly interesting for visualizing very large multidimensional data sets is the class of pixel-oriented techniques. The basic idea of pixel-oriented visualization techniques is to represent as many data objects as possible on the screen at the same time by mapping each data value to a pixel of the screen and arranging the pixels adequately. A number of different pixel-oriented visualization techniques have been proposed in recent years and it has been shown that the techniques are useful for visual data exploration in a number of different application contexts. In this paper, we discuss a number of issues which are important in developing pixel-oriented visualization techniques. The major goal of this article is to provide a formal basis of pixel-oriented visualization techniques and show that the design decisions in developing them can be seen as solutions of well-defined optimization problems. This is true for the mapping of the data values to colors, the arrangement of pixels inside the subwindows, the shape of the subwindows, and the ordering of the dimension subwindows. The paper also discusses the design issues of special variants of pixel-oriented techniques for visualizing large spatial data sets     

Visual signatures in video visualization

Video visualization is a computation process that extracts meaningful information from original video data sets and conveys the extracted information to users in appropriate visual representations. This paper presents a broad treatment of the subject, following a typical research pipeline involving concept formulation, system development, a path-finding user study, and a field trial with real application data. In particular, we have conducted a fundamental study on the visualization of motion events in videos. We have, for the first time, deployed flow visualization techniques in video visualization. We have compared the effectiveness of different abstract visual representations of videos. We have conducted a user study to examine whether users are able to learn to recognize visual signatures of motions, and to assist in the evaluation of different visualization techniques. We have applied our understanding and the developed techniques to a set of application video clips. Our study has demonstrated that video visualization is both technically feasible and cost-effective. It has provided the first set of evidence confirming that ordinary users can be accustomed to the visual features depicted in video visualizations, and can learn to recognize visual signatures of a variety of motion events.     

Towards a product design assessment of visual analytics in decision support applications: a systematic review

There is currently an increasing effort to develop visual analytics (VA) tools that can support human analytical reasoning and decision making. In the last decade, advances in this field has allowed the application of various kinds of VA systems in real-world settings. While this represents a promising start from a product design perspective, part of the challenge to the research community is that current VA tools have evolved without due consideration of standardized design criteria and processes. Accordingly, some questions remain to be addressed on what are the useful, underlying attributes of effective VA tools and how their impact can be measured in human-product interaction. These considerations indicate a need to identify a specific range of VA tools and assess their capabilities through state-of-the-art empirical analysis. To address these issues, we conducted a systematic review of 470 VA papers published between 2006 and 2012. We report on the bibliometric techniques, the evaluation attributes and the metrics that were used to sample and analyze the body of literature. The analysis focused mainly on 26 papers that implemented visual analytics decision support tools. The results are presented in the form of six inductively derived design recommendations that, when taken together, uniquely contribute to the fields of product design and visual analytics.     

A Comparative Evaluation of Visual Summarization Techniques for Event Sequences

Real-world event sequences are often complex and heterogeneous, making it difficult to create meaningful visualizations using simple data aggregation and visual encoding techniques. Consequently, visualization researchers have developed numerous visual summarization techniques to generate concise overviews of sequential data. These techniques vary widely in terms of summary structures and contents, and currently there is a knowledge gap in understanding the effectiveness of these techniques. In this work, we present the design and results of an insight-based crowdsourcing experiment evaluating three existing visual summarization techniques: CoreFlow, SentenTree, and Sequence Synopsis. We compare the visual summaries generated by these techniques across three tasks, on six datasets, at six levels of granularity. We analyze the effects of these variables on summary quality as rated by participants and completion time of the experiment tasks. Our analysis shows that Sequence Synopsis produces the highest-quality visual summaries for all three tasks, but understanding Sequence Synopsis results also takes the longest time. We also find that the participants evaluate visual summary quality based on two aspects: content and interpretability. We discuss the implications of our findings on developing and evaluating new visual summarization techniques.     

Facial expression and body gesture emotion recognition: A systematic review on the use of visual data in affective computing

Emotion is an important driver of human decision-making and communication. With the recent rise of human–computer interaction, affective computing has become a trending research topic, aiming to develop computational systems that can understand human emotions and respond to them. A systematic review has been conducted to fill these gaps since previous reviews regarding machine-enabled automated visual emotion recognition neglect important methodological aspects, including emotion models and hardware usage. 467 relevant papers were initially found and examined. After the screening process with specific inclusion and exclusion criteria, 30 papers were selected. Methodological aspects including emotion models, devices, architectures, and classification techniques employed by the selected studies were analyzed, and the most popular techniques and current trends in visual emotion recognition were identified. This review not only offers a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the topic but also provides researchers with insights regarding methodological aspects like emotion models employed, devices used, and classification techniques for automated visual emotion recognition. By identifying current trends, like the increased use of deep learning algorithms and the need for further study on body gestures, this review advocates the advantages of implementing emotion recognition with the use of visual data and builds a solid foundation for applying relevant techniques in different fields.     

Information visualization and visual data mining

Never before in history has data been generated at such high volumes as it is today. Exploring and analyzing the vast volumes of data is becoming increasingly difficult. Information visualization and visual data mining can help to deal with the flood of information. The advantage of visual data exploration is that the user is directly involved in the data mining process. There are a large number of information visualization techniques which have been developed over the last decade to support the exploration of large data sets. In this paper, we propose a classification of information visualization and visual data mining techniques which is based on the data type to be visualized, the visualization technique, and the interaction and distortion technique. We exemplify the classification using a few examples, most of them referring to techniques and systems presented in this special section     

Nonlinear multiresolution techniques with applications toscientific visualization in a haptic environment

This paper develops nonlinear multiresolution techniques for scientific visualization utilizing haptic methods. The visualization of data is critical to many areas of scientific pursuit. Scientific visualization is generally accomplished through computer graphic techniques. Recent advances in haptic technologies allow visual techniques to be augmented with haptic methods. The kinesthetic feedback provided through haptic techniques provides a second modality for visualization and allows for active exploration. Moreover, haptic methods can be utilized by individuals with visual impairments. Haptic representations of large data sets, however, can be confusing to a user, especially if a visual representation is not available or cannot be used. This paper develops a multiresolution data decomposition method based on the affine median filter. This results in a hybrid structure that can be tuned to yield a decomposition that varies from a linear wavelet decomposition to that produced by the median filter. The performance of this hybrid structure is analyzed utilizing deterministic signals and statistically in the frequency domain. This analysis and qualitative and quantitative implementation results show that the affine median decomposition has advantages over previously proposed methods. In addition to multiresolution decomposition development, analysis, and results, haptic implementation methods are presented     

网络入侵检测技术综述

随着互联网时代的发展,内部威胁、零日漏洞和DoS攻击等攻击行为日益增加,网络安全变得越来越重要,入侵检测已成为网络攻击检测的一种重要手段。随着机器学习算法的发展,研究人员提出了大量的入侵检测技术。本文对这些研究进行了综述。首先,简要介绍了当前的网络安全形势,并给出了入侵检测技术及系统在各个领域的应用。然后,从数据来源、检测技术和检测性能三个方面对入侵检测相关技术和系统进行已有研究工作的总结与评价,其中,检测技术重点论述了传统机器学习、深度学习、强化学习、可视化分析技术等方法。最后,讨论了当前研究中出现的问题并展望该技术的未来发展方向和前景。本文希望能为该领域的研究人员提供一些有益的思考。     

基于压缩域的图像检索技术

图像检索技术是多媒体应用中的关键技术，现有的基于内容图像检索技术大都是基于非压缩域的，对于目前普遍存在的压缩格式图像，采用这种技术必须先解压再检索，不但计算量大，而且需占用较多的中介存储空间，所以严重影响了检索系统的实时性和灵活性，同时各种压缩标准(如JPEG，MPEG，JPEG2000等)的推出与普及也促使人们寻求可以直接在压缩域操作的检索技术，该文对现有的压缩域图像检索技术的发展进行综述，并讨论了未来可能的研究方向。     

Retrieval of high-dimensional visual data: current state,trends and challenges ahead

Information retrieval algorithms have changed the way we manage and use various data sources, such as images, music or multimedia collections. First, free text information of documents from varying sources became accessible in addition to structured data in databases, initially for exact search and then for more probabilistic models. Novel approaches enable content-based visual search of images using computerized image analysis making visual image content searchable without requiring high quality manual annotations. Other multimedia data followed such as video and music retrieval, sometimes based on techniques such as extracting objects and classifying genre. 3D (surface) objects and solid textures have also been produced in quickly increasing quantities, for example in medical tomographic imaging. For these two types of 3D information sources, systems have become available to characterize the objects or textures and search for similar visual content in large databases. With 3D moving sequences (i.e., 4D), in particular medical imaging, even higher-dimensional data have become available for analysis and retrieval and currently present many multimedia retrieval challenges. This article systematically reviews current techniques in various fields of 3D and 4D visual information retrieval and analyses the currently dominating application areas. The employed techniques are analysed and regrouped to highlight similarities and complementarities among them in order to guide the choice of optimal approaches for new 3D and 4D retrieval problems. Opportunities for future applications conclude the article. 3D or higher-dimensional visual information retrieval is expected to grow quickly in the coming years and in this respect this article can serve as a basis for designing new applications.     

Data mining on temporal data: a visual approach and its clinical application to hemodialysis

The quantity and complexity of data acquired, time-stamped and stored in clinical databases by automated medical devices is rapidly and continuously increasing. As a result, it becomes more and more important to provide clinicians with easy-to-use interactive tools to analyze huge amounts of this data. This paper proposes an approach for visual data mining on temporal data and applies it to a real medical problem, i.e. the management of hemodialysis. The approach is based on the integration of 3D and 2D information visualization techniques and offers a set of interactive functionalities that will be described in detail in the paper. We will also discuss how the system has been evaluated with end users and how the evaluation led to changes in system design.     

Data Visualization: Featuring Interactive Visual Analysis

Data visualization is an application‐driven field, that is always trying to satisfy its customers and to adapt to the demands, cultures, and workflows of many application areas. Therefore, it is difficult to keep focus on techniques and approaches that are not too application specific. A lot of good work on data visualization consists of single‐problem solutions, that cannot be easily merged into general‐purpose systems. In this talk, I will briefly review some current trends and issues, and identify some approaches that are common to many applications. One such approach in data visualization that has attracted interest from the early days is the detection of salient features, or patterns of interest in a data set. The main idea is to extract information at a higher level of abstraction from a mass of data, that is richer in semantics but much smaller in size, and that can help to define scenes and objects for visualization. This idea was pioneered in areas such as flow visualization, but is now more widely applied. It is often considered to be necessity to keep up with the ever rapidly increasing size of data sets, and the demand for interactivity in data visualization and analysis. Another generic approach in data visualization is called interactive visual analysis (TVA), consisting of a strongly interactive multiple‐linked‐view interfaces with integrated, powerful data analysis techniques taken from statistical analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning, and other fields. This is built on the assumptions that a single 2D or 3D visualization is often not enough, and spatial views can be augmented with abstract, derived data spaces; that strong interaction helps to promote insight; and that a better balance is needed between human visual inspection and computer‐based analysis and reasoning. Interestingly, an IVA interface can serve not only as an environment for exploration of low‐level data, but also for defining the high‐level features to be extracted, that should summarize the essence of the data. The high‐level features are usually highly application specific, and can only be found using theories from the application domains. The big challenge is to create environments for general purpose visual data analysis, and yet allow users to introduce advanced theories and methods from many application domains. The trend towards more integration in data visualization will be illustrated with cross‐links between very different areas, such as medical and flow visualization, and the combined use of techniques from scientific visualization and information visualization, and the absorption of other data analysis techniques. Also, historic and contemporary examples of feature extraction and interactive visual analysis will be shown.