Correlated Point Sampling for Geospatial Scalar Field Visualization

Abstract

Multi-variate visualizations of geospatial data often use combinations of different visual cues, such as color and texture. For textures, different point distributions (blue noise, regular grids, etc.) can encode nominal data. In this paper, we study the suitability of point distribution interpolation to encode quantitative information. For the interpolation, we use a texture synthesis algorithm, which paves the path towards an encoding of quantitative data using points. First, we conduct a user study to perceptually linearize the transitions between uniform point distributions, including blue noise, regular grids and hexagonal grids. Based on the linearization models, we implement a point sampling-based visualization for geospatial scalar fields and we assess the accuracy of the user perception abilities by comparing the perceived transition with the transition expected from our linearized models. We illustrate our technique on several real geospatial data sets, in which users identify regions with a certain distribution. Point distributions work well in combination with color data, as they require little space and allow the user to see through to the underlying color maps. We found that interpolations between blue noise and regular grids worked perceptively best among the tested candidates.