Node Overlap Removal by Growing a Tree

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, simple algorithm for node overlap removal in graph visualization, which builds a tree on a Delaunay triangulation to efficiently eliminate overlaps while maintaining high layout quality.

Contribution

A novel overlap removal algorithm that uses a growing tree on Delaunay triangulation, offering improved speed and simplicity over existing methods.

Findings

Runs several times faster than state-of-the-art methods.

Produces high-quality, overlap-free layouts.

Simple to implement with effective results.

Abstract

Node overlap removal is a necessary step in many scenarios including laying out a graph, or visualizing a tag cloud. Our contribution is a new overlap removal algorithm that iteratively builds a Minimum Spanning Tree on a Delaunay triangulation of the node centers and removes the node overlaps by "growing" the tree. The algorithm is simple to implement yet produces high quality layouts. According to our experiments it runs several times faster than the current state-of-the-art methods.