Flow‐Based Temporal Selection for Interactive Volume Visualization

Abstract

We present an approach to adaptively select time steps from time‐dependent volume data sets for an integrated and comprehensive visualization. This reduced set of time steps not only saves cost, but also allows to show both the spatial structure and temporal development in one combined rendering. Our selection optimizes the coverage of the complete data on the basis of a minimum‐cost flow‐based technique to determine meaningful distances between time steps. As both optimal solutions of the involved transport and selection problem are prohibitively expensive, we present new approaches that are significantly faster with only minor deviations. We further propose an adaptive scheme for the progressive incorporation of new time steps. An interactive volume raycaster produces an integrated rendering of the selected time steps, and their computed differences are visualized in a dedicated chart to provide additional temporal similarity information. We illustrate and discuss the utility of our approach by means of different data sets from measurements and simulation.We present an approach to adaptively select time steps from time‐dependent volume data sets for an integrated and comprehensive visualization. This reduced set of time steps not only saves cost, but also allows to show both the spatial structure and temporal development in one combined rendering. Our selection optimizes the coverage of the complete data on the basis of a minimum‐cost flow‐based technique to determine meaningful distances between time steps. As both optimal solutions of the involved transport and selection problem are prohibitively expensive, we present new approaches that are significantly faster with only minor deviations. We further propose an adaptive scheme for the progressive incorporation of new time steps.