Visual analytics for persistent scatterer interferometry: first steps and future challenges

In this paper, we introduce persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) as a new and promising application domain for Visual Analytics (VA). PSI studies changes of the Earth's topography by analyzing large time-varying point clouds that easily comprise hundreds of millions of data points. We briefly outline the PSI analysis workflow and present a VA approach to the first step in this workflow based on a flexible and interactive filtering mechanism. We further describe challenges for VA in PSI analysis. We want to engage the VA community in a discussion about potential VA solutions because we expect these solutions to not only advance PSI analysis but also provide valuable insights and contributions for the VA community regarding exploration and analysis of spatiotemporal data.