Chandrajit Bajaj:, Edited by C. Bajaj C 1998 John Wiley & Sons LTD
Chandrajit Bajaj:, Edited by C. Bajaj C 1998 John Wiley & Sons LTD
Chandrajit Bajaj:, Edited by C. Bajaj C 1998 John Wiley & Sons LTD
Visualization Paradigms
Chandrajit L. Bajaj
University of Texas, Austin
ABSTRACT
A wide variety of techniques have been developed for the visualization of scalar,
vector and tensor eld data. They range from volume visualization, to isocontour-
ing, from vector eld streamlines or scalar, vector and tensor topology, to function
on surfaces . This multiplicity of approaches responds to the requirements emerg-
ing from an even wider range of application areas such as computational
uid
dynamics, chemical transport, fracture mechanics, new material development,
electromagnetic scattering/absorption, neuro-surgery, orthopedics, drug design.
In this chapter I present a brief overview of the visualization paradigms currently
used in several of the above application areas. A major objective is to provide
a roadmap that encompasses the majority of the currently available methods
to allow each potential user/developer to select the techniques suitable for his
purpose.
1.1 Introduction
Typically, informative visualizations are based on the combined use of multiple tech-
niques. For example gure 1.1 shows the combined use of isocontouring, volume ren-
dering and slicing to highlight and compare the internal 3D structure of three dierent
vorticity elds. For a detailed description of each of the approaches we make reference
to subsequent chapters in this book and previously published technical papers and
books [Bow95, Cle93, HU94, KK93, NHM97, REE+ 94, Wat92].
DATA VISUALIZATION TECHNIQUES, Edited by C. Bajaj
c 1998 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
4 Bajaj
Figure 1.1 The combined display of isocontours, slicing and volume rendering used to
highlight the 3D structure of vorticity elds.
Figure 1.2 Two volume renderings showing snapshots of wind speed in a global climate
model.
1.2 Volume Rendering
Volume rendering is a projection technique that produces image displays of three-
dimensional volumetric data (see g. 1.2). Its main characteristic is the production of
view-dependent snapshots of volumetric data, rather than the extraction of geometric
information such as isocontouring.
Chapter 2 surveys alternate volume rendering algorithms reported in the literature.
Two main classes of approaches that have been developed dier mainly on the order
1.3 Isocontouring
Isocontouring is the extraction of constant valued curves and surfaces from 2d and 3d
scalar elds. Interactive display and quantitative interrogation of isocontours helps in
determining the overall structure of a scalar eld (see g. 1.3) and its evolution over
time (see g. 1.4).
Chapter 3 surveys the most commonly used isocontouring algorithms along with
recent improvements that permit rapid evaluation of multiple isocontour queries, in
an interactive environment. Traditional isocontouring techniques examine each cell of
a mesh to test for intersection with the isocontour of interest. Accelerated isocontour-
ing can be achieved by preprocessing the input scalar eld both in its domain (the
geometry of the input mesh) and in its range (the values of the sampled scalar eld).
One the one hand, one takes advantage of the known adjacency information of mesh
cells (domain space optimization). Given a single cell c on an isocontour component
one can trace the entire isocontour component from c, by propagating from cell to cell
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6 Bajaj
using inter-cell adjacency. This reduces the search for isocontour components from a
search in the entire input mesh to a search in a much smaller subset called the seed set.
A seed set is a subset of the mesh cells which has at least one cell on each connected
component of each isocontour. From this typically very small seed set of mesh cells
one searches for starting cells for each component of the desired isocontour and then
applies contour propagation through cell adjacencies.
On the other hand, one independently optimizes the search for isocontours exploit-
ing the simplicity of the range of the scalar eld (range space optimization). The
values of the eld are scalars that in range space form an interval. Within each cell
of the mesh (or of mesh cells of the seed set) the scalar eld usually has a small
continuous variation that can be represented in range space as a (small) subinterval.
The isocontour computation is hence reduced in range space to the search for all the
segments that intersect the currently selected isovalue w. This search can be optimally
performed using well known interval tree or segment tree data structures.
Figure 1.3 Skin and bone head models extracted as two dierent isocontours from the
same volumetric MRI data of the Visible Human female.
Figure 1.4 Three isocontours of wind speed that show the time evolution of air dynamics
in a global climate model.
Figure 1.5 (Left) Histological sample of a rat spine. (Right) Reconstruced spinal lesion
within slices of 3D histological volume.
Chapter 4 reviews the shape analysis and visualization of free form surface mod-
els used in computer aided geometric design and computer graphics. The analysis
tools prove essential to detecting surface imperfections aswell as higher order inter-
patch smoothness. Related research on free-form surfaces visualization are addressed
in [BR94, BBB+ 97].
Three special cases of volumetric quantication which are prevalent in data visual-
ization applications apply to the following data types:
Contours - surfaces which are created through isocontouring of scalar data
Slices - surfaces which are formed by tiling multiple planar cross sections of objects
Union of Balls - also known as the solvent accessible surface and common in
molecular visualization
Contour Quantication
Bajaj, Pascucci and Schikore [BPS97] introduce the systematic quantication of met-
ric properties of volumetric data and the relative isocontours. Given an isovalue w
one can compute the surface area of the corresponding isosurface, the volume of the
inside region or any other metric property (also called signature) function of w. The
plot of the signatures gives rise to an interface that drives the user in the direct
selection of interesting isovalues. Figure 1.6 shows the direct selection of noiseless iso-
surfaces corresponding to skin and bone tissues which correspond to the maxima of
the gradient-weighted area signature.
Sliced Data
Objects are frequently reconstructed from serial sections [BCL96b, BCL96a]. In this
case, volume properties can be accurately computed using the following equation for
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Visualization Paradigms 9
Figure 1.6 Three isosurfaces of the same volumetric MRI scan. The vertical bars in the
spectrum interface (top) mark the selected isovalues.
prismatoids, a triangular tiling of two parallel contours: V = h6 (B1 + 4M + B2 ) where
B1 is the area of lower base, B2 is the area of upper base, M is the area of the
midsection joining the bases, and h is the separation between the contours. With n
P equallyPspaced, the composite volume computation results
parallel slices of contours
in: V 0 = h6 (B1 + 4 1n?1 Mi + 2 2n?1 Bi + Bn ).
Union of Balls
The geometric, combinatorial and quantitative structure of the union of a set of balls
has been presented by [Ede95, DE95]. The union of balls model is equivalent to the
space lling model used to represent molecules where each atom is approximated by
a ball with a relative van der Waals radius. Deeper insight on the properites of a
molecule in solution is provided by the computation of the Solvent Accessible Surface
and the Solvent Excluded Surface [SSO96]. The two surfaces are dened by idealizing
the solvent molecule (e.g. water) as a single ball and computing the boundary of the
region that can be accessed by the solvent center (Solvent Accessible oset of the Union
of Balls model of the molecule) or the boundary of the region that cannot be reached
by any point of the solvent (Solvent Excluded). On the basis of the union of balls model
exact representation of both the surfaces can be computed eciently [BLMP97] (see
g. 1.7).
Figure 1.7 (top) Union of Balls, Solvent Accessible and Solvent excluded surfaces of the
Nutrasweet molecule with respect to the same solvent. (bottom) Solvent excluded surface of
the Gramicidin molecule with respect to three increasing solvent radii.
Figure 1.8 Original data (left) Reduced Triangulation (center) Reduced Image (right).
simplication, in which hierarchical triangulations are computed, from which reduced
triangulations can be rapidly extracted depending on time dependent metrics such
as distance from the viewer, location in the eld of view, and approximation error
tolerance.
Height-eld reduction: A driving application for reduction of height-elds is GIS. A
wide range of techniques are based on extraction of key points or edges from the orig-
inally dense set of points, followed by a constrained Delaunay triangulation [DFP85,
FFNP84, FL79, PDDT94, Tsa93, WJ92]. Silva, et. al [SMK95] uses a greedy method
for inserting points into an initially sparse mesh, reporting both better and faster re-
duction compared to a freely available terrain reduction tool. A survey by Lee [Lee91]
reviews methods for computing reduced meshes by both point insertion and point dele-
tion. Bajaj and Schikore [BS95, BS96a] developed practical techniques for measuring
the local errors introduced by simplication operations and bound the global error
accumulated by multiple applications. Their techniques begin with simple scalar elds
and extend easily to multi-valued elds and dened on arbitrary surfaces. Geometric
error in the surface as well as functional error in the data are bounded in a uniform
manner. Topology preserving, error-bounded mesh simplication have also been ex-
plored [BS97]. Figure 1.9 demonstrates geometric mesh reduction while Figure 1.8
demonstrates mesh reduction applied to 2D functional data.
Geometry reduction: Geometric mesh reduction has been approached from several
directions. In the reduction of polygonal models, Turk [Tur92] used point repulsion
on the surface of a polygonal model to generate a set of vertices for retriangulation.
Schroeder, et al. [SZL92] decimate dense polygonal meshes, generated by Marching
Cubes [LC87], by deletion of vertices based on an error criteria, followed by local retri-
angulation with a goal of maintaining good aspect ratio in the resulting triangulation.
Errors incurred from local retriangulation are not propagated to the simplied mesh,
hence there is no global error control. Rossignac, et al.[RB93] uses clustering and
merging of features of an object which are geometrically close, but may not be topo-
logically connected. In this scheme, long thin objects may collapse to an edge and
small objects may contract to a point. Hamann [Ham94] applies a similar technique
in which triangles are considered for deletion based on curvature estimates at the
vertices. Reduction may be driven by mesh resolution or, in the case of functional
Figure 1.9 Three snapshots of geometric mesh simplication of an engine block
surfaces, root-mean-square error. He, et al. [HHK+ 95] perform mesh reduction by
volume sampling and low-pass ltering an object. A multi-resolution triangle mesh is
extracted from the resulting multi-resolution volume buer using traditional isosur-
facing techniques. Hoppe, et al. [HDD+ 93] perform time-intensive mesh optimization
based on the denition of an energy function which balances the need for accurate
geometry with the desire for compactness in representation. The level of mesh sim-
plication is controlled by parameters in the energy function which penalizes meshes
with large numbers of vertices, as well as a spring constant which helps guide the
energy minimization to a desirable result.
In [Hop96], Hoppe introduces Progressive Meshes, created by applying optimization
with the set of basic operations reduced to only an edge contraction. Scalar attributes
are handled by incorporating them into the energy function. Ronfard, et. al [RR96]
also apply successive edge contraction operations to compute a wide range of levels-of-
detail for triangulated polyhedra. Edges are extracted from a priority queue based on
a computed edge cost such that edges of lesser signicance are removed rst. Cohen,
et al. [CVM+ 96] introduce Simplication Envelopes to guide mesh simplication with
global error bounds. Envelopes are an extension of oset surfaces which serve as an ex-
treme boundary for the desired simplied surface. Lindstrom, et. al[LKR+ 96] impose
a recursive triangulation on a regular terrain and compute preprocessing metrics at
various levels of resolution which permits real-time adaptive triangulation for interac-
tive
y-through. Funkhouser et al. describe adaptive display algorithms for rendering
complex environments at a sustained frame rate using multiple levels of detail [FS93].
Delaunay techniques for static simplication have been extended to create hierar-
chies of Delaunay triangulations from which a simplied mesh can be extracted on the
y [dBD95]. Successive levels of the hierarchy are created by deleting points from the
current level and retriangulating according to the Delaunay criteria, giving the hier-
archical structure of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Puppo improves on the approach
of de Berg by augmenting the DAG with information on which triangles between suc-
cessive resolutions are overlapping [Pup96]. With this information, the problem of
extracting a triangulation from the DAG is simplied and requires no backtracking.
It is shown that for a given triangulation criteria, the optimal triangulation satisfying
the criteria which is embedded in the DAG can be extracted in optimal time. Cohen
(a) (b)
Figure 1.10 (a) Arrow plot of a two dimensional vector eld (b) Streamline along focus in
the vortex core surrounded by nearby streamlines.
and Levanoni adopt a tree representation for hierarchical Delaunay triangulation and
demonstrate techniques for maintaining temporal coherence between successive trian-
gulations [COL96]. The technique is demonstrated for relatively sparse terrains, and
it remains to be seen whether the constraints imposed by a tree representation will
restrict simplication for dense triangulated terrains.
Wavelets [Mal89, Dau92] have been utilized for their multiresolution applications
in many areas of computer graphics and visualization [SDS96], including image com-
pression [DJL92a], surface description [DJL92b, EDD+ 95, CPD+ 96], tiling of con-
tours [Mey94] and curve and surface editing [FS94, ZSS97]. A number of multiresolu-
tion volume hierarchies have been proposed for developing adaptive volume rendering
and isocontouring [Mur92, Mur95, CDM+ 94, WV94].
1.7 Topology
Field topology refers to the analysis and classication of critical points and computa-
tion of relationships between the critical points of eld data [Del94]. Computation and
display of eld topology can provide a compact global view of what is otherwise a very
large set of data. Techniques such as volume rendering and line integral convolution
provide qualitative global views of eld topology.
Vector Topology: Given a continuous vector eld, the locations at which the vector
becomes zero are called critical points. Analysis of the critical points can determine
behavior of the vector eld in the local region. In a 2D vector eld, critical points are
classied into sources, sinks, and saddles (see Figure 1.11(a)), with both spiral and
non-spiral cases for sources and sinks [HH90, HH89, GLL91]. In 3D, additional critical
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14 Bajaj
points include the spiral-saddle [HH90], which is useful for locating vortex cores, as
shown in Figure 1.10.
Figure 1.11 (a) Classication of Vector Field zeroes. (b) Critical point classication for
Scalar Field.
Figure 1.12 Two examples of scalar topology of 2D (left) and 3D (right) scalar elds.
The 2D case shows the scalar topology displayed over a color-map of the density in a pion
collision simulation. The 3D case is that of the scalar topology diagram of the wave function
computed for a high potential iron protein.
Scalar Topology: Scalar eld topology can be viewed as a special case of vector eld
topology, where the vector eld is given by the gradient of the scalar function [BS96b].
Critical points in a scalar eld are dened by a zero gradient, and can be classied into
maxima, minima, saddle points, and degenerate cases, as illustrated in Figure 1.11(b).
Two examples are given in Figure 1.12.
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Volume Rendering 15
1.8 Functions on surfaces
Functions on surface visualization deals with the visual display of scalar functions
whose domain is restricted to an arbitrary geometric surface in three dimensions. The
surface may be the isosurface of another scalar eld, or simply a geometric domain
with an associated function eld [FLN+ 90, BOP92, BX94, BBX95].
Figure 1.13 Visualiztion of functions on surfacea. (top-left) The electrostatic energy poten-
tial shown on an isosurface of van der Waals interaction potenial energy. (top-right) Pressure
distribution around the earth globe. (bottom-left) Pressure distribution on the surface of a
jet engine modeled and displayed using tensor product surface splines. (bottom-right) Stress
distribution on a human knee joint based on static loads.
Accelerated IsoContouring of
Scalar Fields
Surface Interrogation:
Visualization Techniques for
Surface Analysis
Applications of Texture
Mapping to Volume and Flow
Visualization