Animation of Orthogonal Texture Patterns for Vector Field Visualization
This paper is an extended version of our EuroVis 2007 paper,
which was invited to IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG).
Sample images and videos can be found on the external project homepage.
This paper is available for download.
Abstract
This paper introduces orthogonal vector field visualization
on 2D manifolds: a representation by lines that
are perpendicular to the input vector field. Line patterns are
generated by line integral convolution (LIC). This visualization
is combined with animation based on motion along the vector
field. This decoupling of the line direction from the direction of
animation allows us to choose the spatial frequencies along the
direction of motion independently from the length scales along
the LIC line patterns. Vision research indicates that local motion
detectors are tuned to certain spatial frequencies of textures, and
the above decoupling enables us to generate spatial frequencies
optimized for motion perception. Furthermore, we introduce a
combined visualization that employs orthogonal LIC patterns
together with conventional, tangential streamline LIC patterns in
order to benefit from the advantages of these two visualization
approaches; the combination of orthogonal and tangential LIC
is achieved by two novel image-space compositing schemes. In
addition, a filtering process is described to achieve a consistent
and temporally coherent animation of orthogonal vector field
visualization. Different filter kernels and filter methods are compared
and discussed in terms of visualization quality and speed.
We present respective visualization algorithms for 2D planar
vector fields and tangential vector fields on curved surfaces, and
demonstrate that those algorithms lend themselves to efficient
and interactive GPU implementations
Index Terms - Scientific visualization, time-dependent vector
fields, flow visualization, texture advection, line integral convolution,
texture synthesis, GPU programming.
Last modified: August 6th, 2008
by Sven Bachthaler