Visual Analysis of Bird Moving Patterns

In spite of recent advances in data analysis techniques, exploration of complex, unstructured spatial-temporal data could still be difficult. An interactive approach, with human in the analysis loop, represents a valuable add on to automatic analysis methods. We describe an interactive visual analysis method to exploration of complex spatio-temporal data sets. The proposed approach is illustrated using a publicly available data set, a collection of bird locations recorded over an extended period of time. In order to explore and comprehend complex patterns in bird movements over time, we provide two new views, the centroids scatter plot view and the distance plot view. Successful analysis of the birds data indicates the usefulness of the newly proposed approach for other spatio-temporal data of a similar structure.