Juxtaform: interactive visual summarization for exploratory shape design

Abstract

We present juxtaform, a novel approach to the interactive summarization of large shape collections for conceptual shape design. We conduct a formative study to ascertain design goals for creative shape exploration tools. Motivated by a mathematical formulation of these design goals, juxtaform integrates the exploration, analysis, selection, and refinement of large shape collections to support an interactive divergence-convergence shape design workflow. We exploit sparse, segmented sketch-stroke visual abstractions of shape and a novel visual summarization algorithm to balance the needs of shape understanding, in-situ shape juxtaposition, and visual clutter. Our evaluation is three-fold: we show that existing shape and stroke clustering algorithms do not address our design goals compared to our proposed shape corpus summarization algorithm; we compare juxtaform against a structured image gallery interface for various shape design and analysis tasks; and we present multiple compelling 2D/3D applications using juxtaform.