The transfer function (TF) design is crucial for enhancing the visualization quality and understanding of volume data in volume rendering. Recent research has proposed various multidimensional TFs to utilize diverse attributes extracted from volume data for controlling individual voxel rendering. Although multidimensional TFs enhance the ability to segregate data, manipulating various attributes for the rendering is cumbersome. In contrast, low-dimensional TFs are more beneficial as they are easier to manage, but separating volume data during rendering is problematic. This paper proposes a novel approach, a two-level transfer function, for rendering volume data by reducing TF dimensions. The proposed technique involves extracting multidimensional TF attributes from volume data and applying t-Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) to the TF attributes for dimensionality reduction. The two-level transfer function combines the classical 2D TF and t-SNE TF in the conventional direct volume rendering pipeline. The proposed approach is evaluated by comparing segments in t-SNE TF and rendering images using various volume datasets. The results of this study demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively allow us to manipulate multidimensional attributes easily while maintaining high visualization quality in volume rendering.

Geographic visualization research has focused on a variety of techniques to represent and explore spatiotemporal data. The goal of those techniques is to enable users to explore events and interactions over space and time in order to facilitate the discovery of patterns, anomalies and relationships within the data. However, it is difficult to extract and visualize data flow patterns over time for non-directional statistical data without trajectory information. In this work, we develop a novel flow analysis technique to extract, represent, and analyze flow maps of non-directional spatiotemporal data unaccompanied by trajectory information. We estimate a continuous distribution of these events over space and time, and extract flow fields for spatial and temporal changes utilizing a gravity model. Then, we visualize the spatiotemporal patterns in the data by employing flow visualization techniques. The user is presented with temporal trends of geo-referenced discrete events on a map. As such, overall spatiotemporal data flow patterns help users analyze geo-referenced temporal events, such as disease outbreaks, crime patterns, etc. To validate our model, we discard the trajectory information in an origin-destination dataset and apply our technique to the data and compare the derived trajectories and the original. Finally, we present spatiotemporal trend analysis for statistical datasets including twitter data, maritime search and rescue events, and syndromic surveillance.