Institut für Visualisierung und Interaktive Systeme
Visualization of Procedurally Encoded Multifield Volumetric Data.
Overview
Computational power has increased dramatically over the past decade and has allowed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) researchers to more accurately simulate many types of flow. However, this new power has also yielded terabytes of data, and CFD researchers now face a difficult task in trying to find, extract, and analyze important flow features buried within these monstrous datasets. Unlike the explosive growth in computational power, visualization tools for these large datasets have experienced a more modest evolution. CFD researchers desperately need new techniques that simplify and automate the process of finding the appropriate portion of their dataset. This community needs a new system that will allow the user to articulate appropriate types of features of interest, provide a compact representation of those features that preserves their intrinsic qualities, and then allow the user to effectively and interactively visualize the feature information on a desktop computer.
Objectives
Detect important features (e.g. shocks) in complex, highly-detailed flows using topological operators based on critical points and separatrix curves and surfaces.
Characterize the immense amount of data relative to these features using a procedural representation consisting of implicit models based on radial basis functions and free-form deformations based on subdivision solids.
Adapt the procedural representation to the appropriate level of detail using multi-resolution techniques based on multigrid methods.
Encapsulate domain specific knowledge as metadata to explore these extremely large datasets both at the feature level and, more importantly, at the higher level of relationships among features (e.g., tip vortices).
Visualize the data directly from the procedural representation, using and extending numerous existing CFD visualization techniques (e.g. cutting planes, isosurfacing, volume splatting, direct volume rendering, particle clouds, streams, rakes, line-integral convolution and glyphs).
Verify the accuracy of the procedural representation with careful tracking of approximation error throughout the entire process, including scanning, modeling, reconstruction and visualization.
Apply these techniques to the large-scale computational flow simulation problems currently studied at Stanford and at the SimCenter at the NSF Engineering Research Center at Mississippi State University.
Publications
Publications can be found on the publication list of the Institute for Visualisation and Interactive Systems web page.
