Automated Dynamic Symbology for Visualization of High Level Fusion

Symbols play an important role in identifying informative objects and are widely used in geo-spatial decision support systems and applications. In high level fusion applications, however, simply placing symbols often lead to information overload problem; symbols quickly grow fast in many applications, such as the post disaster monitoring system we are interested in. This leads to cluttered and overlapped icons. With today’s advanced technologies, new visual effects can lead to better visualization systems where iconic overload may be perceived as a problem. Therefore, conventional method of storage-indexing-retrieval of large sets of prepared icon images is not flexible enough for the visualization of higher fusion levels. Instead, we propose a dynamic symbology, which automatically generates symbols from parameterized components in a three-dimensional space. The extension to tactical graphics can provide better situation awareness from simplified and abstract visualization. We also report on-going efforts on the prototype of a real-time immersive VR.