Supporting Visual Comparisons of Temporal Sequences
Date
2024-12-19
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0009-0006-3513-6620
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Comparing temporal sequences (such as videos or animations) can provide unique insights into the observed differences between entities. Many visual comparison techniques exist for static visualizations, but there is a distinct lack of support for comparisons that combine spatial attributes with temporal sequences. In this thesis, we investigate the inherent challenges of completing a video comparison task and develop a suite of interaction techniques to address these issues. We provide techniques for equalizing the reference frame of displays, juxtaposition techniques for enhancing side-by-side comparison, superposition techniques for stacking displays, explicit-encoding techniques that help visualize the relationships between datasets, and temporal-to-linear techniques that translate between a temporal sequence of frames and a 1D timeline. We ran a usability test on a broad set of techniques and a set of more focused performance studies on one technique called Shadow Marks, which supports multi-view spatial comparison tasks. Feedback from the usability evaluation suggests that our techniques facilitated learnability and utility in several real-world tasks. Performance results from the user studies provide empirical evidence that the Shadow Marks technique improves accuracy and speed in spatial comparison tasks, supporting our usability results and opening the door for future research into temporal sequence comparison.
Description
Keywords
Visual comparison, Temporal sequence, Video, Interaction techniques
Citation
Degree
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Computer Science
Program
Computer Science