Evenly Spaced Streamlines for Surfaces: An Image-Based Approach
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Date
2009
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Abstract
We introduce a novel, automatic streamline seeding algorithm for vector fields defined on surfaces in 3D space. The algorithm generates evenly spaced streamlines fast, simply and efficiently for any general surface-based vector field. It is general because it handles large, complex, unstructured, adaptive resolution grids with holes and discontinuities, does not require a parametrization, and can generate both sparse and dense representations of the flow. It is efficient because streamlines are only integrated for visible portions of the surface. It is simple because the image-based approach removes the need to perform streamline tracing on a triangular mesh, a process which is complicated at best. And it is fast because it makes effective, balanced use of both the CPU and the GPU. The key to the algorithm s speed, simplicity and efficiency is its image-based seeding strategy. We demonstrate our algorithm on complex, real-world simulation data sets from computational fluid dynamics and compare it with object-space streamline visualizations.
Description
@article{10.1111:j.1467-8659.2009.01352.x,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Evenly Spaced Streamlines for Surfaces: An Image-Based Approach}},
author = {Spencer, Benjamin and Laramee, Robert S. and Chen, Guoning and Zhang, Eugene},
year = {2009},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01352.x}
}