Title
An Evaluation of Visual Search Support in Maps.
Abstract
Visual search can be time-consuming, especially if the scene contains a large number of possibly relevant objects. An instance of this problem is present when using geographic or schematic maps with many different elements representing cities, streets, sights, and the like. Unless the map is well-known to the reader, the full map or at least large parts of it must be scanned to find the elements of interest. In this paper, we present a controlled eye-tracking study (30 participants) to compare four variants of map annotation with labels: within-image annotations, grid reference annotation, directional annotation, and miniature annotation. Within-image annotation places labels directly within the map without any further search support. Grid reference annotation corresponds to the traditional approach known from atlases. Directional annotation utilizes a label in combination with an arrow pointing in the direction of the label within the map. Miniature annotation shows a miniature grid to guide the reader to the area of the map in which the label is located. The study results show that within-image annotation is outperformed by all other annotation approaches. Best task completion times are achieved with miniature annotation. The analysis of eye-movement data reveals that participants applied significantly different visual task solution strategies for the different visual annotations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/TVCG.2016.2598898
IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Visualization,Search problems,Two dimensional displays,Indexes,Urban areas,Gaze tracking,Data visualization
Visual search,Grid reference,Computer vision,Data visualization,Annotation,Information retrieval,Visualization,Computer science,Image retrieval,Schematic,Eye tracking,Artificial intelligence
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
23
1
1077-2626
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.42
20
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rudolf Netzel1534.69
Marcel Hlawatsch21289.80
Michael Burch385466.47
Sanjeev Balakrishnan440.42
Hansjörg Schmauder5505.16
Daniel Weiskopf62988204.30