HiVision: Rapid Visualization of Large-Scale Spatial Vector Data

TL;DR

HiVision introduces a display-driven visualization model that leverages pixels and parallel computing to enable real-time rendering of billion-scale large-scale spatial vector data, overcoming traditional data-driven limitations.

Contribution

The paper presents HiVision, a novel pixel-based visualization approach with spatial-index strategies and optimized parallel architecture for large-scale spatial data.

Findings

Outperforms traditional methods in rendering speed.

Enables real-time visualization of billion-scale datasets.

Provides flexible rendering styles for large spatial data.

Abstract

Rapid visualization of large-scale spatial vector data is a long-standing challenge in Geographic Information Science. In existing methods, the computation overheads grow rapidly with data volumes, leading to the incapability of providing real-time visualization for large-scale spatial vector data, even with parallel acceleration technologies. To fill the gap, we present HiVision, a display-driven visualization model for large-scale spatial vector data. Different from traditional data-driven methods, the computing units in HiVision are pixels rather than spatial objects to achieve real-time performance, and efficient spatial-index-based strategies are introduced to estimate the topological relationships between pixels and spatial objects. HiVision can maintain exceedingly good performance regardless of the data volume due to the stable pixel number for display. In addition, an optimized parallel computing architecture is proposed in HiVision to ensure the ability of real-time visualization. Experiments show that our approach outperforms traditional methods in rendering speed and visual effects while dealing with large-scale spatial vector data, and can provide interactive visualization of datasets with billion-scale points/segments/edges in real-time with flexible rendering styles. The HiVision code is open-sourced at https://github.com/MemoryMmy/HiVision with an online demonstration.