RouteFlow: Trajectory-Aware Animated Transitions

2025-02-12

AI Summary

Existing trajectory animation methods focus solely on start and end points, neglecting intermediate local hotspots—such as convergence or divergence points—leading to an imbalance between global trends and local details and exacerbating motion occlusion. To address this, we propose a trajectory-aware animation path generation method that explicitly models intermediate trajectory semantics via a novel “route–stop–seat” three-tier hierarchy: hotspot stops are identified through piecewise clustering; smooth global routes are constructed via graph optimization; and dynamic seat allocation is simulated under geometric and temporal constraints. This design jointly encodes macroscopic movement trends and microscopic hotspot behaviors. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in hotspot localization accuracy and trend readability, maintains comparable object tracking precision, and substantially reduces motion occlusion.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Intelligent Robots: Motion and Path Planning

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Topic discovery and tracking
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web query analysis, representation and understanding

Abstract

Animating objects' movements is widely used to facilitate tracking changes and observing both the global trend and local hotspots where objects converge or diverge. Existing methods, however, often obscure critical local hotspots by only considering the start and end positions of objects' trajectories. To address this gap, we propose RouteFlow, a trajectory-aware animated transition method that effectively balances the global trend and local hotspots while minimizing occlusion. RouteFlow is inspired by a real-world bus route analogy: objects are regarded as passengers traveling together, with local hotspots representing bus stops where these passengers get on and off. Based on this analogy, animation paths are generated like bus routes, with the object layout generated similarly to seat allocation according to their destinations. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, RouteFlow better facilitates identifying the global trend and locating local hotspots while performing comparably in tracking objects' movements.

Problem

• Improves animated object movement visualization
• Balances global trends and local hotspots
• Minimizes occlusion in trajectory transitions

Innovation

• Trajectory-aware animated transition
• Bus route analogy for object movement
• Balanced global trend and local hotspots