Authors:
Ryosuke Saga
1
;
Tomoki Yoshikawa
1
;
Ken Wakita
2
;
Ken Sakamoto
2
;
Gerald Schaefer
3
and
Tomoharu Nakashima
1
Affiliations:
1
Graduate School of Humanities and Sustainable System Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, 1-1 Gakuen-cho, Naka-ku, Sakai, Osaka, Japan
;
2
School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan
;
3
Department of Computer Science, Loughborough University, Epinal Way, Loughborough, U.K.
Keyword(s):
Edge Bundling, Optimisation, Genetic Algorithm, Control Point.
Abstract:
This paper describes a novel approach of edge bundling that employs a genetic algorithm (GA) to optimise the placement of control points. Edge bundling is a useful technique to reduce visual clutter and a number of model-based edge bundling approaches have been introduced in the literature. However, these do not attempt to optimise aesthetic rules directly. Differently from them, our approach assumes that edge bundling is regarded as an optimisation problem for aesthetic rules. To solve this problem, we present an GA-based algorithm where gene representation defines control points of edges in order to allow flexibility and the fitness function is defined based on quantitative criteria for edge bundling. Experimental results using a visualisation of a Japanese airline map demonstrates the feasibility of our proposed method and its usability.