IEEE VIS Publication Dataset

Because of the ever increasing size of output data from scientific simulations, supercomputers are increasingly relied upon to generate visualizations. One use of supercomputers is to generate field lines from large scale flow fields. When generating field lines in parallel, the vector field is generally decomposed into blocks, which are then assigned to processors. Since various regions of the vector field can have different flow complexity, processors will require varying amounts of computation time to trace their particles, causing load imbalance, and thus limiting the performance speedup. To achieve load-balanced streamline generation, we propose a workload-aware partitioning algorithm to decompose the vector field into partitions with near equal workloads. Since actual workloads are unknown beforehand, we propose a workload estimation algorithm to predict the workload in the local vector field. A graph-based representation of the vector field is employed to generate these estimates. Once the workloads have been estimated, our partitioning algorithm is hierarchically applied to distribute the workload to all partitions. We examine the performance of our workload estimation and workload-aware partitioning algorithm in several timings studies, which demonstrates that by employing these methods, better scalability can be achieved with little overhead.

Medical imaging plays a central role in a vast range of healthcare practices. The usefulness of 3D visualizations has been demonstrated for many types of treatment planning. Nevertheless, full access to 3D renderings outside of the radiology department is still scarce even for many image-centric specialties. Our work stems from the hypothesis that this under-utilization is partly due to existing visualization systems not taking the prerequisites of this application domain fully into account. We have developed a medical visualization table intended to better fit the clinical reality. The overall design goals were two-fold: similarity to a real physical situation and a very low learning threshold. This paper describes the development of the visualization table with focus on key design decisions. The developed features include two novel interaction components for touch tables. A user study including five orthopedic surgeons demonstrates that the system is appropriate and useful for this application domain.

Flood disasters are the most common natural risk and tremendous efforts are spent to improve their simulation and management. However, simulation-based investigation of actions that can be taken in case of flood emergencies is rarely done. This is in part due to the lack of a comprehensive framework which integrates and facilitates these efforts. In this paper, we tackle several problems which are related to steering a flood simulation. One issue is related to uncertainty. We need to account for uncertain knowledge about the environment, such as levee-breach locations. Furthermore, the steering process has to reveal how these uncertainties in the boundary conditions affect the confidence in the simulation outcome. Another important problem is that the simulation setup is often hidden in a black-box. We expose system internals and show that simulation steering can be comprehensible at the same time. This is important because the domain expert needs to be able to modify the simulation setup in order to include local knowledge and experience. In the proposed solution, users steer parameter studies through the World Lines interface to account for input uncertainties. The transport of steering information to the underlying data-flow components is handled by a novel meta-flow. The meta-flow is an extension to a standard data-flow network, comprising additional nodes and ropes to abstract parameter control. The meta-flow has a visual representation to inform the user about which control operations happen. Finally, we present the idea to use the data-flow diagram itself for visualizing steering information and simulation results. We discuss a case-study in collaboration with a domain expert who proposes different actions to protect a virtual city from imminent flooding. The key to choosing the best response strategy is the ability to compare different regions of the parameter space while retaining an understanding of what is happening inside the data-flow system.

Multi-material components, which contain metal parts surrounded by plastic materials, are highly interesting for inspection using industrial 3D X-ray computed tomography (3DXCT). Examples of this application scenario are connectors or housings with metal inlays in the electronic or automotive industry. A major problem of this type of components is the presence of metal, which causes streaking artifacts and distorts the surrounding media in the reconstructed volume. Streaking artifacts and dark-band artifacts around metal components significantly influence the material characterization (especially for the plastic components). In specific cases these artifacts even prevent a further analysis. Due to the nature and the different characteristics of artifacts, the development of an efficient artifact-reduction technique in reconstruction-space is rather complicated. In this paper we present a projection-space pipeline for metal-artifacts reduction. The proposed technique first segments the metal in the spatial domain of the reconstructed volume in order to separate it from the other materials. Then metal parts are forward-projected on the set of projections in a way that metal-projection regions are treated as voids. Subsequently the voids, which are left by the removed metal, are interpolated in the 2D projections. Finally, the metal is inserted back into the reconstructed 3D volume during the fusion stage. We present a visual analysis tool, allowing for interactive parameter estimation of the metal segmentation. The results of the proposed artifact-reduction technique are demonstrated on a test part as well as on real world components. For these specimens we achieve a significant reduction of metal artifacts, allowing an enhanced material characterization.

We present a quasi interpolation framework that attains the optimal approximation-order of Voronoi splines for reconstruction of volumetric data sampled on general lattices. The quasi interpolation framework of Voronoi splines provides an unbiased reconstruction method across various lattices. Therefore this framework allows us to analyze and contrast the sampling-theoretic performance of general lattices, using signal reconstruction, in an unbiased manner. Our quasi interpolation methodology is implemented as an efficient FIR filter that can be applied online or as a preprocessing step. We present visual and numerical experiments that demonstrate the improved accuracy of reconstruction across lattices, using the quasi interpolation framework.

The field of visualization has addressed navigation of very large datasets, usually meshes and volumes. Significantly less attention has been devoted to the issues surrounding navigation of very large images. In the last few years the explosive growth in the resolution of camera sensors and robotic image acquisition techniques has widened the gap between the display and image resolutions to three orders of magnitude or more. This paper presents the first steps towards navigation of very large images, particularly landscape images, from an interactive visualization perspective. The grand challenge in navigation of very large images is identifying regions of potential interest. In this paper we outline a three-step approach. In the first step we use multi-scale saliency to narrow down the potential areas of interest. In the second step we outline a method based on statistical signatures to further cull out regions of high conformity. In the final step we allow a user to interactively identify the exceptional regions of high interest that merit further attention. We show that our approach of progressive elicitation is fast and allows rapid identification of regions of interest. Unlike previous work in this area, our approach is scalable and computationally reasonable on very large images. We validate the results of our approach by comparing them to user-tagged regions of interest on several very large landscape images from the Internet.

Flows through tubular structures are common in many fields, including blood flow in medicine and tubular fluid flows in engineering. The analysis of such flows is often done with a strong reference to the main flow direction along the tubular boundary. In this paper we present an approach for straightening the visualization of tubular flow. By aligning the main reference direction of the flow, i.e., the center line of the bounding tubular structure, with one axis of the screen, we are able to natively juxtapose (1.) different visualizations of the same flow, either utilizing different flow visualization techniques, or by varying parameters of a chosen approach such as the choice of seeding locations for integration-based flow visualization, (2.) the different time steps of a time-dependent flow, (3.) different projections around the center line , and (4.) quantitative flow visualizations in immediate spatial relation to the more qualitative classical flow visualization. We describe how to utilize this approach for an informative interactive visual analysis. We demonstrate the potential of our approach by visualizing two datasets from two different fields: an arterial blood flow measurement and a tubular gas flow simulation from the automotive industry.

Study of symmetric or repeating patterns in scalar fields is important in scientific data analysis because it gives deep insights into the properties of the underlying phenomenon. Though geometric symmetry has been well studied within areas like shape processing, identifying symmetry in scalar fields has remained largely unexplored due to the high computational cost of the associated algorithms. We propose a computationally efficient algorithm for detecting symmetric patterns in a scalar field distribution by analysing the topology of level sets of the scalar field. Our algorithm computes the contour tree of a given scalar field and identifies subtrees that are similar. We define a robust similarity measure for comparing subtrees of the contour tree and use it to group similar subtrees together. Regions of the domain corresponding to subtrees that belong to a common group are extracted and reported to be symmetric. Identifying symmetry in scalar fields finds applications in visualization, data exploration, and feature detection. We describe two applications in detail: symmetry-aware transfer function design and symmetry-aware isosurface extraction.

Overlaid reference elements need to be sufficiently visible to effectively relate to the underlying information, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. We seek to create guidelines for presenting such structures through experimental studies to define boundary conditions for visual intrusiveness. We base our work on the practice of designers, who use transparency to integrate overlaid grids with their underlying imagery. Previous work discovered a useful range of alpha values for black or white grids overlayed on scatterplot images rendered in shades of gray over gray backgrounds of different lightness values. This work compares black grids to blue and red ones on different image types of scatterplots and maps. We expected that the coloured grids over grayscale images would be more visually salient than black ones, resulting in lower alpha values. Instead, we found that there was no significant difference between the boundaries set for red and black grids, but that the boundaries for blue grids were set consistently higher (more opaque). As in our previous study, alpha values are affected by image density rather than image type, and are consistently lower than many default settings. These results have implications for the design of subtle reference structures.

Blood flow and derived data are essential to investigate the initiation and progression of cerebral aneurysms as well as their risk of rupture. An effective visual exploration of several hemodynamic attributes like the wall shear stress (WSS) and the inflow jet is necessary to understand the hemodynamics. Moreover, the correlation between focus-and-context attributes is of particular interest. An expressive visualization of these attributes and anatomic information requires appropriate visualization techniques to minimize visual clutter and occlusions. We present the FLOWLENS as a focus-and-context approach that addresses these requirements. We group relevant hemodynamic attributes to pairs of focus-and-context attributes and assign them to different anatomic scopes. For each scope, we propose several FLOWLENS visualization templates to provide a flexible visual filtering of the involved hemodynamic pairs. A template consists of the visualization of the focus attribute and the additional depiction of the context attribute inside the lens. Furthermore, the FLOWLENS supports local probing and the exploration of attribute changes over time. The FLOWLENS minimizes visual cluttering, occlusions, and provides a flexible exploration of a region of interest. We have applied our approach to seven representative datasets, including steady and unsteady flow data from CFD simulations and 4D PC-MRI measurements. Informal user interviews with three domain experts confirm the usefulness of our approach.

We present topological spines-a new visual representation that preserves the topological and geometric structure of a scalar field. This representation encodes the spatial relationships of the extrema of a scalar field together with the local volume and nesting structure of the surrounding contours. Unlike other topological representations, such as contour trees, our approach preserves the local geometric structure of the scalar field, including structural cycles that are useful for exposing symmetries in the data. To obtain this representation, we describe a novel mechanism based on the extraction of extremum graphs-sparse subsets of the Morse-Smale complex that retain the important structural information without the clutter and occlusion problems that arise from visualizing the entire complex directly. Extremum graphs form a natural multiresolution structure that allows the user to suppress noise and enhance topological features via the specification of a persistence range. Applications of our approach include the visualization of 3D scalar fields without occlusion artifacts, and the exploratory analysis of high-dimensional functions.

Sparse, irregular sampling is becoming a necessity for reconstructing large and high-dimensional signals. However, the analysis of this type of data remains a challenge. One issue is the robust selection of neighborhoods - a crucial part of analytic tools such as topological decomposition, clustering and gradient estimation. When extracting the topology of sparsely sampled data, common neighborhood strategies such as k-nearest neighbors may lead to inaccurate results, either due to missing neighborhood connections, which introduce false extrema, or due to spurious connections, which conceal true extrema. Other neighborhoods, such as the Delaunay triangulation, are costly to compute and store even in relatively low dimensions. In this paper, we address these issues. We present two new types of neighborhood graphs: a variation on and a generalization of empty region graphs, which considerably improve the robustness of neighborhood-based analysis tools, such as topological decomposition. Our findings suggest that these neighborhood graphs lead to more accurate topological representations of low- and high- dimensional data sets at relatively low cost, both in terms of storage and computation time. We describe the implications of our work in the analysis and visualization of scalar functions, and provide general strategies for computing and applying our neighborhood graphs towards robust data analysis.

A fundamental challenge for time-varying volume data analysis and visualization is the lack of capability to observe and track data change or evolution in an occlusion-free, controllable, and adaptive fashion. In this paper, we propose to organize a timevarying data set into a hierarchy of states. By deriving transition probabilities among states, we construct a global map that captures the essential transition relationships in the time-varying data. We introduce the TransGraph, a graph-based representation to visualize hierarchical state transition relationships. The TransGraph not only provides a visual mapping that abstracts data evolution over time in different levels of detail, but also serves as a navigation tool that guides data exploration and tracking. The user interacts with the TransGraph and makes connection to the volumetric data through brushing and linking. A set of intuitive queries is provided to enable knowledge extraction from time-varying data. We test our approach with time-varying data sets of different characteristics and the results show that the TransGraph can effectively augment our ability in understanding time-varying data.

In this paper we address the difficult problem of parameter-finding in image segmentation. We replace a tedious manual process that is often based on guess-work and luck by a principled approach that systematically explores the parameter space. Our core idea is the following two-stage technique: We start with a sparse sampling of the parameter space and apply a statistical model to estimate the response of the segmentation algorithm. The statistical model incorporates a model of uncertainty of the estimation which we use in conjunction with the actual estimate in (visually) guiding the user towards areas that need refinement by placing additional sample points. In the second stage the user navigates through the parameter space in order to determine areas where the response value (goodness of segmentation) is high. In our exploration we rely on existing ground-truth images in order to evaluate the "goodness" of an image segmentation technique. We evaluate its usefulness by demonstrating this technique on two image segmentation algorithms: a three parameter model to detect microtubules in electron tomograms and an eight parameter model to identify functional regions in dynamic Positron Emission Tomography scans.

Acceleration is a fundamental quantity of flow fields that captures Galilean invariant properties of particle motion. Considering the magnitude of this field, minima represent characteristic structures of the flow that can be classified as saddle- or vortex-like. We made the interesting observation that vortex-like minima are enclosed by particularly pronounced ridges. This makes it possible to define boundaries of vortex regions in a parameter-free way. Utilizing scalar field topology, a robust algorithm can be designed to extract such boundaries. They can be arbitrarily shaped. An efficient tracking algorithm allows us to display the temporal evolution of vortices. Various vortex models are used to evaluate the method. We apply our method to two-dimensional model systems from computational fluid dynamics and compare the results to those arising from existing definitions.

We present a new technique for providing interpolation within cell-centered Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data that achieves C0 continuity throughout the 3D domain. Our technique improves on earlier work in that it does not require that adjacent patches differ by at most one refinement level. Our approach takes the dual of each mesh patch and generates "stitching cells" on the fly to fill the gaps between dual meshes. We demonstrate applications of our technique with data from Enzo, an AMR cosmological structure formation simulation code. We show ray-cast visualizations that include contributions from particle data (dark matter and stars, also output by Enzo) and gridded hydrodynamic data. We also show results from isosurface studies, including surfaces in regions where adjacent patches differ by more than one refinement level.

Area-preserving maps are found across a wide range of scientific and engineering problems. Their study is made challenging by the significant computational effort typically required for their inspection but more fundamentally by the fractal complexity of salient structures. The visual inspection of these maps reveals a remarkable topological picture consisting of fixed (or periodic) points embedded in so-called island chains, invariant manifolds, and regions of ergodic behavior. This paper is concerned with the effective visualization and precise topological analysis of area-preserving maps with two degrees of freedom from numerical or analytical data. Specifically, a method is presented for the automatic extraction and characterization of fixed points and the computation of their invariant manifolds, also known as separatrices, to yield a complete picture of the structures present within the scale and complexity bounds selected by the user. This general approach offers a significant improvement over the visual representations that are so far available for area-preserving maps. The technique is demonstrated on a numerical simulation of magnetic confinement in a fusion reactor.

The combination of volume data acquired by multiple modalities has been recognized as an important but challenging task. Modalities often differ in the structures they can delineate and their joint information can be used to extend the classification space. However, they frequently exhibit differing types of artifacts which makes the process of exploiting the additional information non-trivial. In this paper, we present a framework based on an information-theoretic measure of isosurface similarity between different modalities to overcome these problems. The resulting similarity space provides a concise overview of the differences between the two modalities, and also serves as the basis for an improved selection of features. Multimodal classification is expressed in terms of similarities and dissimilarities between the isosurfaces of individual modalities, instead of data value combinations. We demonstrate that our approach can be used to robustly extract features in applications such as dual energy computed tomography of parts in industrial manufacturing.

Visual analysis is widely used to study the behavior of molecules. Of particular interest are the analysis of molecular interactions and the investigation of binding sites. For large molecules, however, it is difficult to detect possible binding sites and paths leading to these sites by pure visual inspection. In this paper, we present new methods for the computation and visualization of potential molecular paths. Using a novel filtering method, we extract the significant paths from the Voronoi diagram of spheres. For the interactive visualization of molecules and their paths, we present several methods using deferred shading and other state-of-theart techniques. To allow for a fast overview of reachable regions of the molecule, we illuminate the molecular surface using a large number of light sources placed on the extracted paths. We also provide a method to compute the extension surface of selected paths and visualize it using the skin surface. Furthermore, we use the extension surface to clip the molecule to allow easy visual tracking of even deeply buried paths. The methods are applied to several proteins to demonstrate their usefulness.

We present the visual analysis of a biologically inspired CFD simulation of the deformable flapping wings of a dragonfly as it takes off and begins to maneuver, using vortex detection and integration-based flow lines. The additional seed placement and perceptual challenges introduced by having multiple dynamically deforming objects in the highly unsteady 3D flow domain are addressed. A brief overview of the high speed photogrammetry setup used to capture the dragonfly takeoff, parametric surfaces used for wing reconstruction, CFD solver and underlying flapping flight theory is presented to clarify the importance of several unsteady flight mechanisms, such as the leading edge vortex, that are captured visually. A novel interactive seed placement method is used to simplify the generation of seed curves that stay in the vicinity of relevant flow phenomena as they move with the flapping wings. This method allows a user to define and evaluate the quality of a seed's trajectory over time while working with a single time step. The seed curves are then used to place particles, streamlines and generalized streak lines. The novel concept of flowing seeds is also introduced in order to add visual context about the instantaneous vector fields surrounding smoothly animate streak lines. Tests show this method to be particularly effective at visually capturing vortices that move quickly or that exist for a very brief period of time. In addition, an automatic camera animation method is used to address occlusion issues caused when animating the immersed wing boundaries alongside many geometric flow lines. Each visualization method is presented at multiple time steps during the up-stroke and down-stroke to highlight the formation, attachment and shedding of the leading edge vortices in pairs of wings. Also, the visualizations show evidence of wake capture at stroke reversal which suggests the existence of previously unknown unsteady lift generation mechanisms that are unique to qua- wing insects.