A Fast Line Density Visualization Plugin for Geographic Information Systems

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Tsz Nam Chan, Bojian Zhu, Dingming Wu, Yun Peng, Leong Hou U, Wei Tu, Ruisheng Wang

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 15 Jan 2026SIGMOD Conference Companion 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Line Density Visualization (LDV) has been widely used in different domains, e.g., transportation science, urban planning, and criminology. Therefore, various geographic information systems, e.g., ArcGIS and QGIS, can also support this tool. However, all these GIS platforms mainly adopt the naïve algorithm for generating LDV, which cannot be scalable to high resolution sizes and large-scale line-segment datasets. To tackle this issue, we have developed a new QGIS plugin, called Fast Line Density Analysis, for efficiently supporting two types of accurate approximation, namely (1) generating LDV with an ε-relative error guarantee (εLDV) and (2) generating LDV with multiple thresholds (τLDV). In this demonstration, we have prepared three large-scale datasets (with up to 15.7 million line segments) for participants to compare our plugin with QGIS and ArcGIS in terms of accuracy and efficiency. In particular, participants can also tune different parameters in our plugin for understanding how they can affect the visualization quality and efficiency. The demonstration video is available in the YouTube and Bilibili links, which are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYl3Wieb-2I and https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1aJwaeMEHr, respectively.