Top-Down Hierarchical Planning of Coherent Visual Discourse

A visual discourse is a series of connected visual displays. A coherent visual discourse requires smooth transitions between displays, consistent design within and across displays, and successful integration of new information into existing displays. We present an approach for automatically designing a coherent visual discourse. A top-down, hierarchical-decomposition partial-order planner is used to efficiently plan the visual discourse. Visual representations are modelled as visual objects, graphical techniques are employed as planning operators, and design policies are encoded as constraints. This approach not only improves the computational efficiency compared to search-based approaches, but also facilitates knowledge encoding, and ensures global coherency.

The research described in this overview is supported in part by DARPA Contract DAAL01-94-K-0119, the Columbia Univeristy Center for Advanced Technology in High Performance Computing and Communications in Healthcare (funded by the New York State Science and Technology Foundation), the Columbia Center for Telecommunications Research under NSF Grant ECD-88-11111, ONR Contract N00014-94-1-0564, and a gift from Digital Image Division.

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