Resizing geovisualization with density map via a map collage

Abstract: The extensive distribution of portable digital devices brings demands of adapting media to restricted display spaces or various aspect ratios. Most existing content-aware visualization resizing approaches introduce nonlinear deformation to enhance or preserve salient areas while squeezing non-salient ones. Their deformation on image-based geographic context could cause confusion and make it harder to interpret by the general mobile user. In this paper, we describe a deformation-free approach to resize the geovisualization using density map, resulting in a collage layout of sub-maps, called map collage. We show our technique of constructing a collage layout for one frame of geospatial data and a strategy of extending it to the temporal dimension. We demonstrate the results on two sets of geotemporal data and conducted a survey comparing our method, the seam carving, and the uniform scaling, which shows that ours is more preferred than the other two. Graphic abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]