IEEE/EG International Symposium on Volume Graphics

Every visual communication medium, including 3D visualization and graphics, conveys a certain importance to different elements of the scene. Whether intentional or not, this message is conveyed to the viewer by the choice of scene, camera, illumination, and animation parameters. Traditional art, illustration, and photography have long explored the principles of visual saliency and persuasion. In this talk I shall give an overview of visual saliency and persuasion and their relevance for 3D visualization and graphics.

Research over the last decade has built a solid mathematical foundation for geometric analysis and processing of points, meshes, and volumes. Much of this work however does not explicitly incorporate models of low-level human visual attention. I will give an overview of the concept of visual saliency as a measure of regional importance for 3D visualization and graphics applications. Inspired by low-level human visual system cues, we have defined saliency for 3D scenes by using a center-surround operator in a scale-dependent manner. As the point and volume datasets have grown in complexity, so too has the need to emphasize and draw visual attention to appropriate regions in their visualization. I will give an overview of some visual persuasion techniques based on multi-scale methods for visual saliency that have been shown to be extremely effective in guiding visual attention based on varying perceptual importance in 3D scenes

Short Biography

Amitabh Varshney is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Varshney's research has addressed challenges in interactive 3D visualization for large datasets by reconciling realism with interactivity through multiresolution techniques and high-performance computing. He has served as the papers co-chair for IEEE Visualization 2000 and 2001, program co-chair for IEEE Visualization 2005, and conference co-chair for IEEE Visualization 2006 and 2007. He has served on several conference program committees. During 1999-2003 he served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Varshney received the NSF CAREER award in 1995 and the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2004. Further details are available at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~varshney