Volume 40 (2021)
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Browsing Volume 40 (2021) by Subject "Applied computing"
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Item CommAID: Visual Analytics for Communication Analysis through Interactive Dynamics Modeling(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Fischer, Maximilian T.; Seebacher, Daniel; Sevastjanova, Rita; Keim, Daniel A.; El-Assady, Mennatallah; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonCommunication consists of both meta-information as well as content. Currently, the automated analysis of such data often focuses either on the network aspects via social network analysis or on the content, utilizing methods from text-mining. However, the first category of approaches does not leverage the rich content information, while the latter ignores the conversation environment and the temporal evolution, as evident in the meta-information. In contradiction to communication research, which stresses the importance of a holistic approach, both aspects are rarely applied simultaneously, and consequently, their combination has not yet received enough attention in automated analysis systems. In this work, we aim to address this challenge by discussing the difficulties and design decisions of such a path as well as contribute CommAID, a blueprint for a holistic strategy to communication analysis. It features an integrated visual analytics design to analyze communication networks through dynamics modeling, semantic pattern retrieval, and a user-adaptable and problem-specific machine learning-based retrieval system. An interactive multi-level matrix-based visualization facilitates a focused analysis of both network and content using inline visuals supporting cross-checks and reducing context switches. We evaluate our approach in both a case study and through formative evaluation with eight law enforcement experts using a real-world communication corpus. Results show that our solution surpasses existing techniques in terms of integration level and applicability. With this contribution, we aim to pave the path for a more holistic approach to communication analysis.Item Higher Dimensional Graphics: Conceiving Worlds in Four Spatial Dimensions and Beyond(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Cavallo, Marco; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, IvanWhile the interpretation of high-dimensional datasets has become a necessity in most industries, the spatial visualization of higher-dimensional geometry has mostly remained a niche research topic for mathematicians and physicists. Intermittent contributions to this field date back more than a century, and have had a non-negligible influence on contemporary art and philosophy. However, most contributions have focused on the understanding of specific mathematical shapes, with few concrete applications. In this work, we attempt to revive the community's interest in visualizing higher dimensional geometry by shifting the focus from the visualization of abstract shapes to the design of a broader hyper-universe concept, wherein 3D and 4D objects can coexist and interact with each other. Specifically, we discuss the content definition, authoring patterns, and technical implementations associated with the process of extending standard 3D applications as to support 4D mechanics. We operationalize our ideas through the introduction of a new hybrid 3D/4D videogame called Across Dimensions, which we developed in Unity3D through the integration of our own 4D plugin.Item Implicit Modeling of Patient-Specific Aortic Dissections with Elliptic Fourier Descriptors(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Mistelbauer, Gabriel; Rössl, Christian; Bäumler, Kathrin; Preim, Bernhard; Fleischmann, Dominik; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonAortic dissection is a life-threatening vascular disease characterized by abrupt formation of a new flow channel (false lumen) within the aortic wall. Survivors of the acute phase remain at high risk for late complications, such as aneurysm formation, rupture, and death. Morphologic features of aortic dissection determine not only treatment strategies in the acute phase (surgical vs. endovascular vs. medical), but also modulate the hemodynamics in the false lumen, ultimately responsible for late complications. Accurate description of the true and false lumen, any communications across the dissection membrane separating the two lumina, and blood supply from each lumen to aortic branch vessels is critical for risk prediction. Patient-specific surface representations are also a prerequisite for hemodynamic simulations, but currently require time-consuming manual segmentation of CT data. We present an aortic dissection cross-sectional model that captures the varying aortic anatomy, allowing for reliable measurements and creation of high-quality surface representations. In contrast to the traditional spline-based cross-sectional model, we employ elliptic Fourier descriptors, which allows users to control the accuracy of the cross-sectional contour of a flow channel. We demonstrate (i) how our approach can solve the requirements for generating surface and wall representations of the flow channels, (ii) how any number of communications between flow channels can be specified in a consistent manner, and (iii) how well branches connected to the respective flow channels are handled. Finally, we discuss how our approach is a step forward to an automated generation of surface models for aortic dissections from raw 3D imaging segmentation masks.Item Leveraging Topological Events in Tracking Graphs for Understanding Particle Diffusion(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) McDonald, Torin; Shrestha, Rebika; Yi, Xiyu; Bhatia, Harsh; Chen, De; Goswami, Debanjan; Pascucci, Valerio; Turbyville, Thomas; Bremer, Peer-Timo; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonSingle particle tracking (SPT) of fluorescent molecules provides significant insights into the diffusion and relative motion of tagged proteins and other structures of interest in biology. However, despite the latest advances in high-resolution microscopy, individual particles are typically not distinguished from clusters of particles. This lack of resolution obscures potential evidence for how merging and splitting of particles affect their diffusion and any implications on the biological environment. The particle tracks are typically decomposed into individual segments at observed merge and split events, and analysis is performed without knowing the true count of particles in the resulting segments. Here, we address the challenges in analyzing particle tracks in the context of cancer biology. In particular, we study the tracks of KRAS protein, which is implicated in nearly 20% of all human cancers, and whose clustering and aggregation have been linked to the signaling pathway leading to uncontrolled cell growth. We present a new analysis approach for particle tracks by representing them as tracking graphs and using topological events –- merging and splitting, to disambiguate the tracks. Using this analysis, we infer a lower bound on the count of particles as they cluster and create conditional distributions of diffusion speeds before and after merge and split events. Using thousands of time-steps of simulated and in-vitro SPT data, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method, as it offers the biologists a new, detailed look into the relationship between KRAS clustering and diffusion speeds.Item Local Extraction of 3D Time-Dependent Vector Field Topology(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Hofmann, Lutz; Sadlo, Filip; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonWe present an approach to local extraction of 3D time-dependent vector field topology. In this concept, Lagrangian coherent structures, which represent the separating manifolds in time-dependent transport, correspond to generalized streak manifolds seeded along hyperbolic path surfaces (HPSs). Instead of expensive and numerically challenging direct computation of the HPSs by intersection of ridges in the forward and backward finite-time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE) fields, our approach employs local extraction of respective candidates in the four-dimensional space-time domain. These candidates are subsequently refined toward the hyperbolic path surfaces, which provides unsteady equivalents of saddle-type critical points, periodic orbits, and bifurcation lines from steady, traditional vector field topology. In contrast to FTLE-based methods, we obtain an explicit geometric representation of the topological skeleton of the flow, which for steady flows coincides with the hyperbolic invariant manifolds of vector field topology. We evaluate our approach on analytical flows, as well as data from computational fluid dynamics, using the FTLE as a ground truth superset, i.e., we also show that FTLE ridges exhibit several types of false positives.Item Modeling Visual Containment for Web Page Layout Optimization(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Kikuchi, Kotaro; Otani, Mayu; Yamaguchi, Kota; Simo-Serra, Edgar; Zhang, Fang-Lue and Eisemann, Elmar and Singh, KaranWeb pages have become fundamental in conveying information for companies and individuals, yet designing web page layouts remains a challenging task for inexperienced individuals despite web builders and templates. Visual containment, in which elements are grouped together and placed inside container elements, is an efficient design strategy for organizing elements in a limited display, and is widely implemented in most web page designs. Yet, visual containment has not been explicitly addressed in the research on generating layouts from scratch, which may be due to the lack of hierarchical structure. In this work, we represent such visual containment as a layout tree, and formulate the layout design task as a hierarchical optimization problem. We first estimate the layout tree from a given a set of elements, which is then used to compute tree-aware energies corresponding to various desirable design properties such as alignment or spacing. Using an optimization approach also allows our method to naturally incorporate user intentions and create an interactive web design application. We obtain a dataset of diverse and popular real-world web designs to optimize and evaluate various aspects of our method. Experimental results show that our method generates better quality layouts compared to the baseline method.Item Neural Acceleration of Scattering-Aware Color 3D Printing(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Rittig, Tobias; Sumin, Denis; Babaei, Vahid; Didyk, Piotr; Voloboy, Alexey; Wilkie, Alexander; Bickel, Bernd; Myszkowski, Karol; Weyrich, Tim; Krivánek, Jaroslav; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, IvanWith the wider availability of full-color 3D printers, color-accurate 3D-print preparation has received increased attention. A key challenge lies in the inherent translucency of commonly used print materials that blurs out details of the color texture. Previous work tries to compensate for these scattering effects through strategic assignment of colored primary materials to printer voxels. To date, the highest-quality approach uses iterative optimization that relies on computationally expensive Monte Carlo light transport simulation to predict the surface appearance from subsurface scattering within a given print material distribution; that optimization, however, takes in the order of days on a single machine. In our work, we dramatically speed up the process by replacing the light transport simulation with a data-driven approach. Leveraging a deep neural network to predict the scattering within a highly heterogeneous medium, our method performs around two orders of magnitude faster than Monte Carlo rendering while yielding optimization results of similar quality level. The network is based on an established method from atmospheric cloud rendering, adapted to our domain and extended by a physically motivated weight sharing scheme that substantially reduces the network size. We analyze its performance in an end-to-end print preparation pipeline and compare quality and runtime to alternative approaches, and demonstrate its generalization to unseen geometry and material values. This for the first time enables full heterogenous material optimization for 3D-print preparation within time frames in the order of the actual printing time.Item PosterChild: Blend-Aware Artistic Posterization(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Chao, Cheng-Kang; Singh, Karan; Gingold, Yotam; Bousseau, Adrien and McGuire, MorganPosterization is an artistic effect which converts continuous images into regions of constant color with smooth boundaries, often with an artistically recolored palette. Artistic posterization is extremely time-consuming and tedious. We introduce a blend-aware algorithm for generating posterized images with palette-based control for artistic recoloring. Our algorithm automatically extracts a palette and then uses multi-label optimization to find blended-color regions in terms of that palette. We smooth boundaries away from image details with frequency-guided median filtering. We evaluate our algorithm with a comparative user study and showcase its ability to produce compelling posterizations of a variety of inputs. Our parameters provide artistic control and enable cohesive, real-time recoloring after posterization pre-processing.Item SimJEB: Simulated Jet Engine Bracket Dataset(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Whalen, Eamon; Beyene, Azariah; Mueller, Caitlin; Digne, Julie and Crane, KeenanThis paper introduces the Simulated Jet Engine Bracket Dataset (SimJEB) [WBM21]: a new, public collection of crowdsourced mechanical brackets and accompanying structural simulations. SimJEB is applicable to a wide range of geometry processing tasks; the complexity of the shapes in SimJEB offer a challenge to automated geometry cleaning and meshing, while categorical labels and structural simulations facilitate classification and regression (i.e. engineering surrogate modeling). In contrast to existing shape collections, SimJEB's models are all designed for the same engineering function and thus have consistent structural loads and support conditions. On the other hand, SimJEB models are more complex, diverse, and realistic than the synthetically generated datasets commonly used in parametric surrogate model evaluation. The designs in SimJEB were derived from submissions to the GrabCAD Jet Engine Bracket Challenge: an open engineering design competition with over 700 hand-designed CAD entries from 320 designers representing 56 countries. Each model has been cleaned, categorized, meshed, and simulated with finite element analysis according to the original competition specifications. The result is a collection of 381 diverse, high-quality and application-focused designs for advancing geometric deep learning, engineering surrogate modeling, automated cleaning and related geometry processing tasks.Item Visual Analysis of Electronic Densities and Transitions in Molecules(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Masood, Talha Bin; Thygesen, Signe Sidwall; Linares, Mathieu; Abrikosov, Alexei I.; Natarajan, Vijay; Hotz, Ingrid; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonThe study of electronic transitions within a molecule connected to the absorption or emission of light is a common task in the process of the design of new materials. The transitions are complex quantum mechanical processes and a detailed analysis requires a breakdown of these processes into components that can be interpreted via characteristic chemical properties. We approach these tasks by providing a detailed analysis of the electron density field. This entails methods to quantify and visualize electron localization and transfer from molecular subgroups combining spatial and abstract representations. The core of our method uses geometric segmentation of the electronic density field coupled with a graph-theoretic formulation of charge transfer between molecular subgroups. The design of the methods has been guided by the goal of providing a generic and objective analysis following fundamental concepts. We illustrate the proposed approach using several case studies involving the study of electronic transitions in different molecular systems.Item Visualizing Carotid Blood Flow Simulations for Stroke Prevention(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Eulzer, Pepe; Meuschke, Monique; Klingner, Carsten M.; Lawonn, Kai; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana vonIn this work, we investigate how concepts from medical flow visualization can be applied to enhance stroke prevention diagnostics. Our focus lies on carotid stenoses, i.e., local narrowings of the major brain-supplying arteries, which are a frequent cause of stroke. Carotid surgery can reduce the stroke risk associated with stenoses, however, the procedure entails risks itself. Therefore, a thorough assessment of each case is necessary. In routine diagnostics, the morphology and hemodynamics of an afflicted vessel are separately analyzed using angiography and sonography, respectively. Blood flow simulations based on computational fluid dynamics could enable the visual integration of hemodynamic and morphological information and provide a higher resolution on relevant parameters. We identify and abstract the tasks involved in the assessment of stenoses and investigate how clinicians could derive relevant insights from carotid blood flow simulations. We adapt and refine a combination of techniques to facilitate this purpose, integrating spatiotemporal navigation, dimensional reduction, and contextual embedding. We evaluated and discussed our approach with an interdisciplinary group of medical practitioners, fluid simulation and flow visualization researchers. Our initial findings indicate that visualization techniques could promote usage of carotid blood flow simulations in practice.