Texture-based edge bundling: A web-based approach for interactively visualizing large graphs

Directly visualizing a large graph as a node-link diagram often incurs visual clutter. Edge bundling can effectively address this issue and concisely reveal the main graph structure with reduced visual clutter. Although researchers have devoted noticeable efforts to develop acceleration methods, it remains a challenging task to efficiently conduct edge bundling on devices with a limited computing capacity, such as ubiquitous smart mobile devices. We present a new method for visualizing a node-link diagram based on force-directed edge bundling. We use textures to encode the data of lines and forces, and employ shaders to conduct the iterative line refinement on GPUs. We name this method as Texture-Based Edge Bundling (TBEB) as the major steps are done using textures. We demonstrate the high performance of TBEB using standard graphics cards. TBEB makes it feasible to interactively visualize large graphs on web-based platforms.