Uma abordagem de partição e interpolação de conjuntos de polígonos para visualização temporal de fenômenos geoespaciais

Abstract

Geospatial phenomena, such as territorial disputes, urban occupation and concentration of crimes, can be represented and analyzed through thematic maps constructed by different techniques. In this area, the use of animation can be a good alternative to static visualizations when communicating dynamic changes. Some approaches already represent spatiotemporal phenomena using a polygon set for each time instant. However, these representations are static and not general enough to be applied to the interpolation of arbitrary polygons. Furthermore, the problem of interpolating arbitrary polygons has a set of requirements that are not satisfied by the currently available tools. For example, the polygons are arbitrary, and the interpolation should be smooth and fully automatic (not requiring user intervention). To solve this problem, this work presents an approach for automatic polygon set interpolation and different techniques for spatial division, allowing the visualization of temporal changes in different phenomena with animations. It was performed a series of experiments with different types of interpolation, demonstrating that the proposed approach, when associated with the Voronoi-based polygon division method, satisfied all the established requirements. An application using the proposed approach was developed for visualization and analysis of the temporal evolution of crime maps, and it was a consistent alternative to current static visualization tools.