Automatic graphical abstraction in intent-based 3D-illustrations

The purpose of this paper is to present models, methods and techniques to control automatically the degree of details in graphics or animation in an intelligent way. Instead of just aiming at the technical advantages of such a reduction (i.e. saving computer memory and computational load), this work focuses on clarifying the intention of graphics or animation with the means of abstraction. The goal is to direct the viewer's attention to relevant parts of the graphics, without using metaobjects or - colours (e.g. arrows, blinking objects etc.) and to reduce the probability of distracting the viewer's attention by unimportant details.The paper describes the major problems of this task and provides a knowledge-based solution to yield an intelligent control of the level of detail, improving the expressivity of the graphics or animation and saving computational resources at the same time. To emphasize the plausibility of these ideas the graphical abstraction system ARP is presented and its results are discussed.