Force Directed Edge Bundling

Developer

Anna Frühstück
0626930

Approach

In node link diagrams with a large number of edges, visual clutter can make it difficult for the user to recognize patterns in the connections between the nodes.
Force directed edge bundling aims to overcome this problem by bundling edges that are similar to each other into clusters.
This bundling process is performed through an iterative approach in which mutual attracting forces are applied to edges that have a high degree of similarity.

Implementation

The technique was implementation as a multithreaded C++ application with Qt 5.2 as a GUI framework, making use of the Qt OpenGL rendering functionality for the graph drawing.

Screenshot

Documentation

Executables

Code

Reference

[Holten et al. 2009] Danny Holten and Jarke J. van Wijk.
2009. Force-directed edge bundling for graph visualization.
In Proceedings of the 11th Eurographics / IEEE - VGTC
conference on Visualization (EuroVis'09)