AnthroVis: visual analysis of 3D mesh ensembles for forensic anthropology

Digital approaches to shape comparison and analysis play a very important role in forensic anthropology. New methods are still emerging and the whole area is experiencing a shift from traditional 2D image data to processing of 3D meshes. Therefore, the visual exploration of 3D meshes and methods for their visual comparison play a crucial role in the anthropological research. In our paper we present a novel AnthroVis tool for visual analysis of 3D mesh ensembles, which was designed in tight cooperation with the domain experts. It aims to enhance their workflow by introducing several visualizations that help to understand the similarities and differences between 3D meshes. AnthroVis in general consists of three methods, which serve as a guidance in the process of the comparison of two or more mesh ensembles. The first method, based on the idea of interactive heat plots, provides an overview of pairwise comparisons in a set of analyzed meshes and enables their filtering and sorting. The second method consists of anthropologically relevant cross-cuts indicating the variability through the set of meshes. The last method uses superimposition principle for pairs of meshes equipped with several visual enhancements indicating local mesh differences in three-dimensional space. The domain expert evaluation was performed primarily on facial images, but the tool proved to be applicable to other areas of forensic anthropology as well. Its usefulness is demonstrated by three case studies describing the real situations and problems encountered by anthropologists in forensic casework.