A unified approach to streamline selection and viewpoint selection for 3D flow visualization

RipViz: Finding Rip Currents by Learning Pathline Behavior

We present a hybrid machine learning and flow analysis feature detection method, RipViz, to extract rip currents from stationary videos. Rip currents are dangerous strong currents that can drag beachgoers out to sea. Most people are either unaware of them or do not know what they look like. In some instances, even trained personnel such as lifeguards have difficulty identifying them. RipViz produces a simple, easy to understand visualization of rip location overlaid on the source video. With RipViz, we first obtain an unsteady 2D vector field from the stationary video using optical flow. Movement at each pixel is analyzed over time. At each seed point, sequences of short pathlines, rather a single long pathline, are traced across the frames of the video to better capture the quasi-periodic flow behavior of wave activity. Because of the motion on the beach, the surf zone, and the surrounding areas, these pathlines may still appear very cluttered and incomprehensible. Furthermore, lay audiences are not familiar with pathlines and may not know how to interpret them. To address this, we treat rip currents as a flow anomaly in an otherwise normal flow. To learn about the normal flow behavior, we train an LSTM autoencoder with pathline sequences from normal ocean, foreground, and background movements. During test time, we use the trained LSTM autoencoder to detect anomalous pathlines (i.e., those in the rip zone). The origination points of such anomalous pathlines, over the course of the video, are then presented as points within the rip zone. RipViz is fully automated and does not require user input. Feedback from domain expert suggests that RipViz has the potential for wider use.

Reconstructing Unsteady Flow Data From Representative Streamlines via Diffusion and Deep-Learning-Based Denoising

We propose VFR-UFD, a new deep learning framework that performs vector field reconstruction (VFR) for unsteady flow data (UFD). Given integral flow lines (i.e., streamlines), we first generate low-quality UFD via diffusion. VFR-UFD then leverages a convolutional neural network to reconstruct spatiotemporally coherent, high-quality UFD. The core of VFR-UFD lies in recurrent residual blocks that iteratively refine and denoise the input vector fields at different scales, both locally and globally. We take consecutive time steps as input to capture temporal coherence and apply streamline-based optimization to preserve spatial coherence. To show the effectiveness of VFR-UFD, we experiment with several vector field data sets to report quantitative and qualitative results and compare VFR-UFD with two VFR methods and one compression algorithm.

Integral Curve Clustering and Simplification for Flow Visualization: A Comparative Evaluation

Unsupervised clustering techniques have been widely applied to flow simulation data to alleviate clutter and occlusion in the resulting visualization. However, there is an absence of systematic guidelines for users to evaluate (both quantitatively and visually) the appropriate clustering technique and similarity measures for streamline and pathline curves. In this work, we provide an overview of a number of prevailing curve clustering techniques. We then perform a comprehensive experimental study to qualitatively and quantitatively compare these clustering techniques coupled with popular similarity measures used in the flow visualization literature. Based on our experimental results, we derive empirical guidelines for selecting the appropriate clustering technique and similarity measure given the requirements of the visualization task. We believe our work will inform the task of generating meaningful reduced representations for large-scale flow data and inspire the continuous investigation of a more refined guidance on clustering technique selection.

Fourier Opacity Optimization for Scalable Exploration

Over the past decades, scientific visualization became a fundamental aspect of modern scientific data analysis. Across all data-intensive research fields, ranging from structural biology to cosmology, data sizes increase rapidly. Dealing with the growing large-scale data is one of the top research challenges of this century. For the visual exploratory data analysis, interactivity, a view-dependent visibility optimization and frame coherence are indispensable. In this work, we extend the recent decoupled opacity optimization framework to enable a navigation without occlusion of important features through large geometric data. By expressing the accumulation of importance and optical depth in Fourier basis, the computation, evaluation and rendering of optimized transparent geometry become not only order-independent, but also operate within a fixed memory bound. We study the quality of our Fourier approximation in terms of accuracy, memory requirements and efficiency for both the opacity computation, as well as the order-independent compositing. We apply the method to different point, line and surface data sets originating from various research fields, including meteorology, health science, astrophysics and organic chemistry.

Streamline pair selection for comparative flow field visualization

Fluid dynamics simulation is often repeated under varying conditions. This leads to a generation of large amounts of results, which are difficult to compare. To compare results under different conditions, it is effective to overlap the streamlines generated from each condition in a single three-dimensional space. Streamline is a curved line, which represents a wind flow. This paper presents a technique to automatically select and visualize important streamlines that are suitable for the comparison of the simulation results. Additionally, we present an implementation to observe the flow fields in virtual reality spaces.

FlowNet: A Deep Learning Framework for Clustering and Selection of Streamlines and Stream Surfaces

For effective flow visualization, identifying representative flow lines or surfaces is an important problem which has been studied. However, no work can solve the problem for both lines and surfaces. In this paper, we present FlowNet, a single deep learning framework for clustering and selection of streamlines and stream surfaces. Given a collection of streamlines or stream surfaces generated from a flow field data set, our approach converts them into binary volumes and then employs an autoencoder to learn their respective latent feature descriptors. These descriptors are used to reconstruct binary volumes for error estimation and network training. Once converged, the feature descriptors can well represent flow lines or surfaces in the latent space. We perform dimensionality reduction of these feature descriptors and cluster the projection results accordingly. This leads to a visual interface for exploring the collection of flow lines or surfaces via clustering, filtering, and selection of representatives. Intuitive user interactions are provided for visual reasoning of the collection with ease. We validate and explain our deep learning framework from multiple perspectives, demonstrate the effectiveness of FlowNet using several flow field data sets of different characteristics, and compare our approach against state-of-the-art streamline and stream surface selection algorithms.

Multivariate Pointwise Information-Driven Data Sampling and Visualization

With increasing computing capabilities of modern supercomputers, the size of the data generated from the scientific simulations is growing rapidly. As a result, application scientists need effective data summarization techniques that can reduce large-scale multivariate spatiotemporal data sets while preserving the important data properties so that the reduced data can answer domain-specific queries involving multiple variables with sufficient accuracy. While analyzing complex scientific events, domain experts often analyze and visualize two or more variables together to obtain a better understanding of the characteristics of the data features. Therefore, data summarization techniques are required to analyze multi-variable relationships in detail and then perform data reduction such that the important features involving multiple variables are preserved in the reduced data. To achieve this, in this work, we propose a data sub-sampling algorithm for performing statistical data summarization that leverages pointwise information theoretic measures to quantify the statistical association of data points considering multiple variables and generates a sub-sampled data that preserves the statistical association among multi-variables. Using such reduced sampled data, we show that multivariate feature query and analysis can be done effectively. The efficacy of the proposed multivariate association driven sampling algorithm is presented by applying it on several scientific data sets.

Flow Field Reduction Via Reconstructing Vector Data From 3-D Streamlines Using Deep Learning

We present a new approach for streamline-based flow field representation and reduction. Our method can work in the in situ visualization setting by tracing streamlines from each time step of the simulation and storing compressed streamlines for post hoc analysis where users can afford longer reconstruction time for higher reconstruction quality using decompressed streamlines. At the heart of our approach is a deep learning method for vector field reconstruction that takes the streamlines traced from the original vector fields as input and applies a two-stage process to reconstruct high-quality vector fields. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we show qualitative and quantitative results with several data sets and compare our method against the de facto method of gradient vector flow in terms of speed and quality tradeoff.

A Survey of Viewpoint Selection Methods for Polygonal Models

Viewpoint selection has been an emerging area in computer graphics for some years, and it is now getting maturity with applications in fields such as scene navigation, scientific visualization, object recognition, mesh simplification, and camera placement. In this survey, we review and compare twenty-two measures to select good views of a polygonal 3D model, classify them using an extension of the categories defined by Secord et al., and evaluate them against the Dutagaci et al. benchmark. Eleven of these measures have not been reviewed in previous surveys. Three out of the five short-listed best viewpoint measures are directly related to information. We also present in which fields the different viewpoint measures have been applied. Finally, we provide a publicly available framework where all the viewpoint selection measures are implemented and can be compared against each other.

Extinction-Optimized Volume Illumination

We present a novel method to optimize the attenuation of light for the single scattering model in direct volume rendering. A common problem of single scattering is the high dynamic range between lit and shadowed regions due to the exponential attenuation of light along a ray. Moreover, light is often attenuated too strong between a sample point and the camera, hampering the visibility of important features. Our algorithm employs an importance function to selectively illuminate important structures and make them visible from the camera. With the importance function, more light can be transmitted to the features of interest, while contextual structures cast shadows which provide visual cues for perception of depth. At the same time, more scattered light is transmitted from the sample point to the camera to improve the primary visibility of important features. We formulate a minimization problem that automatically determines the extinction along a view or shadow ray to obtain a good balance between sufficient transmittance and attenuation. In contrast to previous approaches, we do not require a computationally expensive solution of a global optimization, but instead provide a closed-form solution for each sampled extinction value along a view or shadow ray and thus achieve interactive performance.

A Vocabulary Approach to Partial Streamline Matching and Exploratory Flow Visualization

Measuring the similarity of integral curves is fundamental to many important flow data analysis and visualization tasks such as feature detection, pattern querying, streamline clustering, and hierarchical exploration. In this paper, we introduce FlowString, a novel vocabulary approach that extracts shape invariant features from streamlines and utilizes a string-based method for exploratory streamline analysis and visualization. Our solution first resamples streamlines by considering their local feature scales. We then classify resampled points along streamlines based on the shape similarity around their local neighborhoods. We encode each streamline into a string of well-selected shape characters, from which we construct meaningful words for querying and retrieval. A unique feature of our approach is that it captures intrinsic streamline similarity that is invariant under translation, rotation and scaling. We design an intuitive interface and user interactions to support flexible querying, allowing exact and approximate searches for partial streamline matching. Users can perform queries at either the character level or the word level, and define their own characters or words conveniently for customized search. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FlowString with several flow field data sets of different sizes and characteristics. We also extend FlowString to handle multiple data sets and perform an empirical expert evaluation to confirm the usefulness of this approach.

An Automated Approach for Slicing Plane Placement in Visual Data Analysis

Effective display and visual analysis of complex 3D data is a challenging task. Occlusions, overlaps, and projective distortions-as frequently caused by typical 3D rendering techniques-can be major obstacles to unambiguous and robust data analysis. Slicing planes are a ubiquitous tool to resolve several of these issues. They act as simple clipping geometry to provide clear cut-away views of the data. We propose to enhance the visualization and analysis process by providing methods for automatic placement of such slicing planes based on local optimization of gradient vector flow. The final obtained slicing planes maximize the total amount of information displayed with respect to a pre-specified importance function. We demonstrate how such automated slicing plane placement is able to support and enrich 3D data visualization and analysis in multiple scenarios, such as volume or surface rendering, and evaluate its performance in several benchmark data sets.

A deformation framework for focus+context flow visualization

Striking a careful balance among coverage, occlusion, and complexity is a resounding theme in the visual understanding of large and complex three-dimensional flow fields. In this paper, we present a novel deformation framework for focus+context streamline visualization that reduces occlusion and clutter around the focal regions while compacting the context region in a full view. Unlike existing techniques that vary streamline densities, we advocate a different approach that manipulates streamline positions. This is achieved by partitioning the flow field's volume space into blocks and deforming the blocks to guide streamline repositioning. We formulate block expansion and block smoothing into energy terms and solve for a deformed grid that minimizes the objective function under the volume boundary and edge flipping constraints. Leveraging a GPU linear system solver, we demonstrate interactive focus+context visualization with 3D flow field data of various characteristics. Compared to the fisheye focus+context technique, our method can magnify multiple streamlines of focus in different regions simultaneously while minimizing the distortion through optimized deformation. Both automatic and manual feature specifications are provided for flexible focus selection and effective visualization.