Illuminating the path of video visualization in the shadow of video processing

Video visualization is a newly emerged technology drawing the concepts and methodologies from volume and flow visualization, image and video processing, and vision science. It extracts meaningful information from a video data set and conveys the extracted information to users in appropriate visual representations. It is not intended to provide fully automatic solutions to the traditional problems in video processing, but aims at offering an approach that involves human in the loop of intelligent reasoning while removing the burden of viewing videos. In this paper, we examine the technical scope of this new technology and relate it to the technical advances in video processing. In particular, we highlight the areas where video visualization can offer more generic solutions with minimal effort for adjusting scene-specific parameters and hard-coding application-specific logic, as well as areas where video visualization can benefit from a large collection of theories and algorithms which have already been developed for video processing. We also briefly discuss the potential applicability of advances in video processing to the broader spectrum of time-varying data visualization.