Detection, tracking, and visualization of spatial event clusters for real time monitoring

Spatial events, such as lightning strikes or drops in moving vehicle speed, can be conceptualized as points in the space-time continuum. We consider real time monitoring scenarios in which the observer needs to detect significant (i.e., sufficiently big) spatio-temporal clusters of events as soon as they occur and track the further evolution of these clusters. Isolated spatial events and small clusters are of no interest (i.e., treated as noise) and should be hidden from the observer to avoid attention distraction and perceptual overload. The existing methods for stream clustering cannot enable on-the-fly separation of event clusters from the noise and immediate presentation of significant clusters and their evolution. We propose a novel algorithm tailored to this specific task and a visual analytics system that supports event stream monitoring by presenting detected event clusters and their evolution to the observer in real time.