Visual Analysis of Popping in Progressive Visualization

Progressive visualization allows users to examine intermediate results while they are further refined in the background. This makes them increasingly popular when dealing with large data and computationally expensive tasks. The characteristics of how preliminary visualizations evolve over time are crucial for efficient analysis; in particular unexpected disruptive changes between iterations can significantly hamper the user experience. This paper proposes a visualization framework to analyze the refinement behavior of progressive visualization. We particularly focus on sudden significant changes between the iterations, which we denote as popping artifacts, in reference to undesirable visual effects in the context of level of detail representations in computer graphics. Our visualization approach conveys where in image space and when during the refinement popping artifacts occur. It allows to compare across different runs of stochastic processes, and supports parameter studies for gaining further insights and tuning the algorithms under consideration. We demonstrate the application of our framework and its effectiveness via two diverse use cases with underlying stochastic processes: adaptive image space sampling, and the generation of grid layouts.