Describing Abstraction in Rendered Images through Figure Captions

We analyze illustration and abstraction techniques used in rendered images. We argue that it is important to convey these techniques to viewers of such images to enhance the process of image understanding. This leads us to derive methods for automatically generating figure captions for rendered images which describe the abstraction carried out. We apply this concept to computer generated anatomic illustrations. Strategies for the content selection for figure captions, for setting user preferences and for updating figure captions and for interaction with figure captions are described. The paper also describes a prototypical implementation.