Perception-aware Sampling for Scatterplot Visualizations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Moumoulidou, Zafeiria, Elhamdadi, Hamza, Yang, Ke, Mitra, Subrata, Bearfield, Cindy Xiong, Meliou, Alexandra
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Moumoulidou, Zafeiria
Elhamdadi, Hamza
Yang, Ke
Mitra, Subrata
Bearfield, Cindy Xiong
Meliou, Alexandra
author_facet Moumoulidou, Zafeiria
Elhamdadi, Hamza
Yang, Ke
Mitra, Subrata
Bearfield, Cindy Xiong
Meliou, Alexandra
contents Visualizing data is often a crucial first step in data analytics workflows, but growing data sizes pose challenges due to computational and visual perception limitations. As a result, data analysts commonly down-sample their data and work with subsets. Deriving representative samples, however, remains a challenge. This paper focuses on scatterplots, a widely-used visualization type, and introduces a novel sampling objective -- perception-awareness -- aiming to improve sample efficacy by targeting humans' perception of a visualization. We make the following contributions: (1) We propose perception-augmented databases and design PAwS: a novel perception-aware sampling method for scatterplots that leverages saliency maps -- a computer vision tool for predicting areas of attention focus in visualizations -- and models perception-awareness via saliency, density, and coverage objectives. (2) We design ApproPAwS: a fast, perception-aware method for approximate visualizations, which exploits the fact that small visual perturbations are often imperceptible to humans. (3) We introduce the concept of perceptual similarity as a metric for sample quality, and present a novel method that compares saliency maps to measure it. (4) Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that our methods consistently outperform prior art in producing samples with high perceptual similarity, while ApproPAwS achieves up to 100x speed-ups with minimal loss in visual fidelity. Our user study shows that PAwS is often preferred by humans, validating our quantitative findings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_20369
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Perception-aware Sampling for Scatterplot Visualizations
Moumoulidou, Zafeiria
Elhamdadi, Hamza
Yang, Ke
Mitra, Subrata
Bearfield, Cindy Xiong
Meliou, Alexandra
Human-Computer Interaction
Databases
Visualizing data is often a crucial first step in data analytics workflows, but growing data sizes pose challenges due to computational and visual perception limitations. As a result, data analysts commonly down-sample their data and work with subsets. Deriving representative samples, however, remains a challenge. This paper focuses on scatterplots, a widely-used visualization type, and introduces a novel sampling objective -- perception-awareness -- aiming to improve sample efficacy by targeting humans' perception of a visualization. We make the following contributions: (1) We propose perception-augmented databases and design PAwS: a novel perception-aware sampling method for scatterplots that leverages saliency maps -- a computer vision tool for predicting areas of attention focus in visualizations -- and models perception-awareness via saliency, density, and coverage objectives. (2) We design ApproPAwS: a fast, perception-aware method for approximate visualizations, which exploits the fact that small visual perturbations are often imperceptible to humans. (3) We introduce the concept of perceptual similarity as a metric for sample quality, and present a novel method that compares saliency maps to measure it. (4) Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that our methods consistently outperform prior art in producing samples with high perceptual similarity, while ApproPAwS achieves up to 100x speed-ups with minimal loss in visual fidelity. Our user study shows that PAwS is often preferred by humans, validating our quantitative findings.
title Perception-aware Sampling for Scatterplot Visualizations
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20369