Our society has entered a data-driven era one in which not only are enormous amounts of data
being generated daily but there are also growing expectations placed on the analysis of this
data. Some data have become simply too large to be displayed and some have too short a lifespan
to be handled properly with classical visualization or analysis methods. In order to address
these issues this book explores the potential solutions where we not only visualize data but
also allow users to be able to interact with it. Therefore this book will focus on two main
topics: large dataset visualization and interaction.Graphic cards and their image processing
power can leverage large data visualization but they can also be of great interest to support
interaction. Therefore this book will show how to take advantage of graphic card computation
power with techniques called GPGPUs (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units).
As specific examples this book details GPGPU usages to produce fast enough visualization to be
interactive with improved brushing techniques fast animations between different data
representations and view simplifications (i.e. static and dynamic bundling techniques).Since
data storage and memory limitation is less and less of an issue we will also present
techniques to reduce computation time by using memory as a new tool to solve computationally
challenging problems. We will investigate innovative data processing techniques: while
classical algorithms are expressed in data space (e.g. computation on geographic locations) we
will express them in graphic space (e.g. raster map like a screen composed of pixels). This
consists of two steps: (1) a data representation is built using straightforward visualization
techniques and (2) the resulting image undergoes purely graphical transformations using image
processing techniques. This type of technique is called image-based visualization.The goal of
this book is to explore new computing techniques using image-based techniques to provide
efficient visualizations and user interfaces for the exploration of large datasets. This book
concentrates on the areas of information visualization visual analytics computer graphics
and human-computer interaction. This book opens up a whole field of study including the
scientific validation of these techniques their limitations and their generalizations to
different types of datasets.
