Visualization, Selection, and Analysis of Traffic Flows

Visualization of the trajectories of moving objects leads to dense and cluttered images, which hinders exploration and understanding. It also hinders adding additional visual information, such as direction, and makes it difficult to interactively extract traffic flows, i.e., subsets of trajectories. In this paper we present our approach to visualize traffic flows and provide interaction tools to support their exploration. We show an overview of the traffic using a density map. The directions of traffic flows are visualized using a particle system on top of the density map. The user can extract traffic flows using a novel selection widget that allows for the intuitive selection of an area, and filtering on a range of directions and any additional attributes. Using simple, visual set expressions, the user can construct more complicated selections. The dynamic behaviors of selected flows may then be shown in annotation windows in which they can be interactively explored and compared. We validate our approach through use cases where we explore and analyze the temporal behavior of aircraft and vessel trajectories, e.g., landing and takeoff sequences, or the evolution of flight route density. The aircraft use cases have been developed and validated in collaboration with domain experts.