Structure-aware visualization retrieval

• Main Authors: LI, Haotian, WANG, Yong, WU Aoyu, WEI, Huan, QU, Huamin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Data visualization; Visualization retrieval; Visualization similarity; Representation learning; Visualization embedding; Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7750; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8753/viewcontent/3491102.3502048.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

With the wide usage of data visualizations, a huge number of Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG)-based visualizations have been created and shared online. Accordingly, there has been an increasing interest in exploring how to retrieve perceptually similar visualizations from a large corpus, since it can beneft various downstream applications such as visualization recommendation. Existing methods mainly focus on the visual appearance of visualizations by regarding them as bitmap images. However, the structural information intrinsically existing in SVG-based visualizations is ignored. Such structural information can delineate the spatial and hierarchical relationship among visual elements, and characterize visualizations thoroughly from a new perspective. This paper presents a structureaware method to advance the performance of visualization retrieval by collectively considering both the visual and structural information. We extensively evaluated our approach through quantitative comparisons, a user study and case studies. The results demonstrate the efectiveness of our approach and its advantages over existing methods.