Crease surfaces describe extremal structures of 3D scalar fields. We present a new region-growing-based approach to the meshless extraction of adaptive nonmanifold valley and ridge surfaces that overcomes limitations of previous approaches by decoupling point seeding and triangulation of the surface. Our method is capable of extracting valley surface skeletons as connected minimum structures. As our algorithm is inherently mesh-free and curvature adaptive, it is suitable for surface construction in fields with an arbitrary neighborhood structure. As an application for insightful visualization with valley surfaces, we choose a low frequency acoustics simulation. We use our valley surface construction approach to visualize the resulting complex-valued scalar pressure field for arbitrary frequencies to identify regions of sound cancellation. This provides an expressive visualization of the topology of wave node and antinode structures in simulated acoustics.

Abstract The evolution of strain and development of material anisotropy in models of the Earth’s mantle flow convey important information about how to interpret the geometric relationship between observation of seismic anisotropy and the actual mantle flow field. By combining feature extraction techniques such as path line integration and tensor accumulation, we compute time‐varying strain vector fields that build the foundation for a number of feature extraction and visualization techniques. The proposed field segmentation, clustering, histograms and multi‐volume visualization techniques facilitate an intuitive understanding of three‐dimensional strain in such flow fields, overcoming limitations of previous methods such as 2‐D line plots and slicing. We present applications of our approach to an artificial time varying flow data set and a real world example of stationary flow in a subduction zone and discuss the challenges of processing these geophysical data sets as well as the insights gained.

Abstract This paper presents a novel method for the extraction and visualization of volume deformations in grid‐less point based flow simulations. Our primary goals are the segmentation of different paths through a mixing device and the visualization of ellipsoidal particle deformations. The main challenges are the numerically efficient processing of deformation tensors and the robust integration of stream‐ and streaklines at boundaries of the dataset such that closed segments are obtained. Our results show two‐ and three‐dimensional particle deformations as well as the segmentation of volumes in stationary fields and areas in time‐dependent datasets taking consistent paths through a mixing device.

Abstract We present an acoustic rendering approach visualizing the listener‐specific contribution of frequency‐dependent pressure fields on a scene geometry with acoustic reflection and scattering properties. Our method facilitates the evaluation of simulated acoustics showing the effect of simulation parameters like absorption and scattering. The image‐based spatial localization of acoustic properties is complementary to the auditive evaluation by means of auralization. Our core contribution is a pressure‐based acoustic rendering equation and a corresponding raytracing method applying techniques from photorealistic rendering to the field of simulated room acoustics. Applications are directed at the visualization of interference patterns and analyzing the impact of acoustic reflection parameters.

We present a novel GPU-based algorithm for high-quality rendering of bivariate spline surfaces. An essential difference to the known methods for rendering graph surfaces is that we use quartic smooth splines on triangulations rather than triangular meshes. Our rendering approach is direct in the sense that since we do not use an intermediate tessellation but rather compute ray-surface intersections (by solving quartic equations numerically) as well as surface normals (by using Bernstein-Bézier techniques) for Phong illumination on the GPU. Inaccurate shading and artifacts appearing for triangular tesselated surfaces are completely avoided. Level of detail is automatic since all computations are done on a per fragment basis. We compare three different (quasi-) interpolating schemes for uniformly sampled gridded data, which differ in the smoothness and the approximation properties of the splines. The results show that our hardware based renderer leads to visualizations (including texturing, multiple light sources, environment mapping, etc.) of highest quality.

Acoustic quality in room acoustics is measured by well defined quantities, like definition, which can be derived from simulated impulse response filters or measured values. These take into account the intensity and phase shift of multiple reflections due to a wave front emanating from a sound source. Definition (D50) and clarity (C50) for example correspond to the fraction of the energy received in total to the energy received in the first 50 ms at a certain listener position. Unfortunately, the impulse response measured at a single point does not provide any information about the direction of reflections, and about the reflection surfaces which contribute to this measure. For the visualization of room acoustics, however, this information is very useful since it allows to discover regions with high contribution and provides insight into the influence of all reflecting surfaces to the quality measure. We use the phonon tracing method to calculate the contribution of the reflection surfaces to the impulse response for different listener positions. This data is used to compute importance values for the geometry taking a certain acoustic metric into account. To get a visual insight into the directional aspect, we map the importance to the reflecting surfaces of the geometry. This visualization indicates which parts of the surfaces need to be changed to enhance the chosen acoustic quality measure. We apply our method to the acoustic improvement of a lecture hall by means of enhancing the overall speech comprehensibility (clarity) and evaluate the results using glyphs to visualize the clarity (C50) values at listener positions throughout the room.

We present a novel approach for analyzing two-dimensional (2D) flow field data based on the idea of invariant moments. Moment invariants have traditionally been used in computer vision applications, and we have adapted them for the purpose of interactive exploration of flow field data. The new class of moment invariants we have developed allows us to extract and visualize 2D flow patterns, invariant under translation, scaling, and rotation. With our approach one can study arbitrary flow patterns by searching a given 2D flow data set for any type of pattern as specified by a user. Further, our approach supports the computation of moments at multiple scales, facilitating fast pattern extraction and recognition. This can be done for critical point classification, but also for patterns with greater complexity. This multi-scale moment representation is also valuable for the comparative visualization of flow field data. The specific novel contributions of the work presented are the mathematical derivation of the new class of moment invariants, their analysis regarding critical point features, the efficient computation of a novel feature space representation, and based upon this the development of a fast pattern recognition algorithm for complex flow structures.

In this work we present several visualization approaches for analyzing acoustic behavior inside a room. Our methods are based on the results of the phonon tracing algorithm. For a simulated phonon map we examine the influence of the room surfaces on the wave fronts during their propagation from the sound source. Our visualization is based on individual phonon and surface representations as well as scattered data interpolation. Additionally, an observation of acoustic behavior at different positions inside the room using colored and deformed spheres is possible.

We present a comparative visualization of the acoustic simulation results obtained by two different approaches that were combined into a single simulation algorithm. The first method solves the wave equation on a volume grid based on finite elements. The second method, phonon tracing, is a geometric approach that we have previously developed for interactive simulation, visualization and modeling of room acoustics. Geometric approaches of this kind are more efficient than FEM in the high and medium frequency range. For low frequencies they fail to represent diffraction, which on the other hand can be simulated properly by means of FEM. When combining both methods we need to calibrate them properly and estimate in which frequency range they provide comparable results. For this purpose we use an acoustic metric called gain and display the resulting error. Furthermore we visualize interference patterns, since these depend not only on diffraction, but also exhibit phase-dependent amplification and neutralization effects.

We present a new algorithm extracting and fairing surfaces from segmented volumes composed of multiple materials. In a first pass, the material boundaries in the volume are smoothed considering signed distance functions for the individual materials. Second, we apply a marching-cubes-like contouring method providing initial meshes defining material boundaries. Non-manifold features emerge along lines where more than two materials encounter. Finally, the mesh geometry is relaxed in a constrained fairing process. We use our algorithm to construct a heart model from segmented time-varying magnetic resonance images. Information concerning the heart ontology is used to merge certain structures to functional units.

We present a new particle tracing approach for the simulation of mid- and high-frequency sound. Inspired by the photorealism obtained by methods like photon mapping, we develop a similar method for the physical simulation of sound within rooms. For given source and listener positions, our method computes a finite-response filter accounting for the different reflections at various surfaces with frequency-dependent absorption coefficients. Convoluting this filter with an anechoic input signal reproduces a realistic aural impression of the simulated room. We do not consider diffraction effects due to low frequencies, since these can be better computed by finite elements. Our method allows the visualization of a wave front propagation using color-coded blobs traversing the paths of individual phonons.

We propose an interpolating refinement method for two- and three-dimensional scalar fields defined on hexahedral grids. Iterative fairing of the underlying contours (isosurfaces) provides the function values of new grid points. Our method can be considered as a nonlinear variational subdivision scheme for volumes. It can be applied locally for adaptive mesh refinement in regions of high geometric complexity. We use our scheme to increase the quality of low-resolution data sets and to reduce interpolation artifacts in texture-based volume rendering.

We present a new construction of lifted biorthogonal wavelets on surfaces of arbitrary two-manifold topology for compression and multiresolution representation. Our method combines three approaches: subdivision surfaces of arbitrary topology, B-spline wavelets, and the lifting scheme for biorthogonal wavelet construction. The simple building blocks of our wavelet transform are local lifting operations performed on polygonal meshes with subdivision hierarchy. Starting with a coarse, irregular polyhedral base mesh, our transform creates a subdivision hierarchy of meshes converging to a smooth limit surface. At every subdivision level, geometric detail can be expanded from wavelet coefficients and added to the surface. We present wavelet constructions for bilinear, bicubic, and biquintic B-Spline subdivision. While the bilinear and bicubic constructions perform well in numerical experiments, the biquintic construction turns out to be unstable. For lossless compression, our transform can be computed in integer arithmetic, mapping integer coordinates of control points to integer wavelet coefficients. Our approach provides a highly efficient and progressive representation for complex geometries of arbitrary topology.

We present a method for the hierarchical approximation of functions in one, two, or three variables based on the finite element method (Ritz approximation). Starting with a set of data sites with associated function, we first determine a smooth (scattered-data) interpolant. Next, we construct an initial triangulation by triangulating the region bounded by the minimal subset of data sites defining the convex hull of all sites. We insert only original data sites, thus reducing storage requirements. For each triangulation, we solve a minimization problem: computing the best linear spline approximation of the interpolant of all data, based on a functional involving function values and first derivatives. The error of a best linear spline approximation is computed in a Sobolev-like norm, leading to element-specific error values. We use these interval/triangle/tetrahedron-specific values to identify the element to subdivide next. The subdivision of an element with largest error value requires the recomputation of all spline coefficients due to the global nature of the problem. We improve efficiency by 1) subdividing multiple elements simultaneously and 2) by using a sparse-matrix representation and system solver.

Volume rendering and isosurface extraction from three-dimensional scalar fields are mostly based on piecewise trilinear representations. In regions of high geometric complexity such visualization methods often exhibit artifacts, due to trilinear interpolation. In this work, we present an iterative fairing method for scalar fields interpolating function values associated with grid points while smoothing the contours inside the grid cells based on variational principles. We present a local fairing method providing a piecewise bicubic representation of two-dimensional scalar fields. Our algorithm generalizes to the trivariate case and can be used to increase the resolution of data sets either locally or globally, reducing interpolation artifacts. In contrast to filtering methods, our algorithm does not reduce geometric detail supported by the data.

We present a new wavelet compression and multiresolution modeling approach for sets of contours (level sets). In contrast to previous wavelet schemes, our algorithm creates a parametrization of a scalar field induced by its contours and compactly stores this parametrization rather than function values sampled on a regular grid. Our representation is based on hierarchical polygon meshes with subdivision connectivity whose vertices are transformed into wavelet coefficients. From this sparse set of coefficients, every set of contours can be efficiently reconstructed at multiple levels of resolution. When applying lossy compression, introducing high quantization errors, our method preserves contour topology, in contrast to compression methods applied to the corresponding field function. We provide numerical results for scalar fields defined on planar domains. Our approach generalizes to volumetric domains, time-varying contours, and level sets of vector fields.

We introduce a new subdivision-surface wavelet transform for arbitrary two-manifolds with boundary that is the first to use simple lifting-style filtering operations with bicubic precision. We also describe a conversion process for re-mapping large-scale isosurfaces to have subdivision connectivity and fair parameterizations so that the new wavelet transform can be used for compression and visualization. The main idea enabling our wavelet transform is the circular symmetrization of the filters in irregular neighborhoods, which replaces the traditional separation of filters into two 1-D passes. Our wavelet transform uses polygonal base meshes to represent surface topology, from which a Catmull-Clark-style subdivision hierarchy is generated. The details between these levels of resolution are quickly computed and compactly stored as wavelet coefficients. The isosurface conversion process begins with a contour triangulation computed using conventional techniques, which we subsequently simplify with a variant edge-collapse procedure, followed by an edge-removal process. This provides a coarse initial base mesh, which is subsequently refined, relaxed and attracted in phases to converge to the contour. The conversion is designed to produce smooth, untangled and minimally-skewed parameterizations, which improves the subsequent compression after applying the transform. We have demonstrated our conversion and transform for an isosurface obtained from a high-resolution turbulent-mixing hydrodynamics simulation, showing the potential for compression and level-of-detail visualization.