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arXiv · 1902.01454

External Labeling Techniques: A Taxonomy and Survey

Michael A. Bekos·Benjamin Niedermann·Martin Nöllenburg
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Abstract

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.

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Michael A. Bekos, Benjamin Niedermann, Martin Nöllenburg. 2019-02-04. External Labeling Techniques: A Taxonomy and Survey. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01454

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