Focus+Context Route Zooming and Information Overlay in 3D Urban Environments

Speaker:	Dr. Huamin QU
		Department of Computer Science and Engineering
		Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Title:		"Focus+Context Route Zooming and Information
		 Overlay in 3D Urban Environments"

Date:		Monday, 14 September, 2009

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

With the rapid development of 3D modeling and rendering technologies, it
is now possible to model a whole city and then show it to the users via
Google Earth or Virtual Earth. This opens doors to many applications,
especially for tourists to virtually explore a city and plan their tours.
A very common task users often perform in a 3D urban environment is to
find and view a route from one building to another.  In this talk, I will
introduce a novel focus+context zooming technique, which allows users to
zoom into a route and its associated landmarks in a 3D urban environment
from a 45-degree bird's-eye view. Through the creative utilization of the
empty space in an urban environment, our technique can informatively
reveal the focus region and minimize distortions to the context buildings.
We first create more empty space in the 2D map by broadening the road with
an adapted seam carving algorithm. A grid-based zooming technique is then
used to enlarge the landmarks to reclaim the created empty space and thus
reduce distortions to the other parts. Finally, an occlusion-free route
visualization scheme adaptively scales the buildings occluding the route
to make the route always visible to users. Our method can be conveniently
integrated into Google Earth and Virtual Earth to provide seamless route
zooming and help users better explore a city and plan their tours. It can
also be used in other applications such as information overlay to a
virtual city.


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Biography:

Huamin Qu is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science
and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His
main research interests are in visualization and computer graphics. He has
conducted a wide range of research on scientific visualization,
information visualization, visual analytics, real time graphics systems,
virtual reality, and medical imaging. Prior to his academic career, he had
some years of extensive experience in commercial software development. He
obtained a BS in Mathematics from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, an MS
and a PhD in Computer Science from the Stony Brook University. He received
a 2009 IBM Faculty Award.