Dynamic Label Placement for Forensic Case Visualization

Abstract

Forensic case analysis and in court presentation requires comprehensible illustrations and animations of findings and their relations to the course of events. Often this can only be achieved by adding textual descriptions. From a systems point of view, this requires automated label placement functionality for scenes composed of translucent polyhedral models and volumes, which we achieve through tight integration of the automated label placement algorithm and the hybrid volume/surface rendering system. Our method exploits transparency in order to place labels close to their anchors, either inside the scene, on-top or outside the occupied screen region. Inside placement makes it possible to zoom into the dataset, leads to more temporal coherency, and improves layout quality, especially for large numbers of labels. New measures for scene content importance and label occlusion prevent masking of important scene details by labels and vice versa.