Premium
External Labeling Techniques: A Taxonomy and Survey
Author(s) -
Bekos Michael A.,
Niedermann Benjamin,
Nöllenburg Martin
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/cgf.13729
Subject(s) - sketch , computer science , taxonomy (biology) , field (mathematics) , information retrieval , set (abstract data type) , open research , visualization , computer graphics , multidisciplinary approach , artificial intelligence , data science , world wide web , algorithm , social science , botany , mathematics , pure mathematics , biology , programming language , sociology
External labeling is frequently used for annotating features in graphical displays and visualizations, such as technical illustrations, anatomical drawings, or maps, with textual information. Such a labeling connects features within an illustration by thin leader lines with their labels, which are placed in the empty space surrounding the image. Over the last twenty years, a large body of literature in diverse areas of computer science has been published that investigates many different aspects, models, and algorithms for automatically placing external labels for a given set of features. This state‐of‐the‐art report introduces a first unified taxonomy for categorizing the different results in the literature and then presents a comprehensive survey of the state of the art, a sketch of the most relevant algorithmic techniques for external labeling algorithms, as well as a list of open research challenges in this multidisciplinary research field.