Simplifying Flexible Isosurfaces Using Local Geometric Measures

• Published in: 2004 IEEE Visualization Conference pp. 497 - 504
• Main Authors: Carr, Hamish, Snoeyink, Jack, van de Panne, Michiel
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society 10.10.2004; IEEE
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Artificial intelligence; Blood vessels; Computer science; Computer science; control theory; systems; Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface; contour trees; Data mining; Data visualization; Exact sciences and technology; Isosurfaces; Lakes; Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry; Rendering (computer graphics); Skull; Sockets; Software; Surface topography; topological simplification; contour trees; topological simplification; Isosurfaces; Computational geometry; User interface; Data visualization; Contour line; Very large databases; Image rendering; Tridimensional image; Minor; Topology; Abstraction; Transfer function
• ISBN: 0780387880; 9780780387881
• DOI: 10.1109/VISUAL.2004.96

The contour tree, an abstraction of a scalar field that encodes the nesting relationships of isosurfaces, can be used to accelerate isosurface extraction, to identify important isovalues for volume-rendering transfer functions, and to guide exploratory visualization through a flexible isosurface interface. Many real-world data sets produce unmanageably large contour trees which require meaningful simplification. We define local geometric measures for individual contours, such as surface area and contained volume, and provide an algorithm to compute these measures in a contour tree. We then use these geometric measures to simplify the contour trees, suppressing minor topological features of the data. We combine this with a flexible isosurface interface to allow users to explore individual contours of a dataset interactively.