Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 165
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    Rendering and Extracting Extremal Features in 3D Fields
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2018) Kindlmann, Gordon L.; Chiw, Charisee; Huynh, Tri; Gyulassy, Attila; Reppy, John; Bremer, Peer-Timo; Jeffrey Heer and Heike Leitte and Timo Ropinski
    Visualizing and extracting three-dimensional features is important for many computational science applications, each with their own feature definitions and data types. While some are simple to state and implement (e.g. isosurfaces), others require more complicated mathematics (e.g. multiple derivatives, curvature, eigenvectors, etc.). Correctly implementing mathematical definitions is difficult, so experimenting with new features requires substantial investments. Furthermore, traditional interpolants rarely support the necessary derivatives, and approximations can reduce numerical stability. Our new approach directly translates mathematical notation into practical visualization and feature extraction, with minimal mental and implementation overhead. Using a mathematically expressive domain-specific language, Diderot, we compute direct volume renderings and particlebased feature samplings for a range of mathematical features. Non-expert users can experiment with feature definitions without any exposure to meshes, interpolants, derivative computation, etc. We demonstrate high-quality results on notoriously difficult features, such as ridges and vortex cores, using working code simple enough to be presented in its entirety.
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    Memento: Localized Time‐Warping for Spatio‐Temporal Selection
    (© 2020 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2020) Solteszova, V.; Smit, N. N.; Stoppel, S.; Grüner, R.; Bruckner, S.; Benes, Bedrich and Hauser, Helwig
    Interaction techniques for temporal data are often focused on affecting the spatial aspects of the data, for instance through the use of transfer functions, camera navigation or clipping planes. However, the temporal aspect of the data interaction is often neglected. The temporal component is either visualized as individual time steps, an animation or a static summary over the temporal domain. When dealing with streaming data, these techniques are unable to cope with the task of re‐viewing an interesting local spatio‐temporal event, while continuing to observe the rest of the feed. We propose a novel technique that allows users to interactively specify areas of interest in the spatio‐temporal domain. By employing a time‐warp function, we are able to slow down time, freeze time or even travel back in time, around spatio‐temporal events of interest. The combination of such a (pre‐defined) time‐warp function and brushing directly in the data to select regions of interest allows for a detailed review of temporally and spatially localized events, while maintaining an overview of the global spatio‐temporal data. We demonstrate the utility of our technique with several usage scenarios.
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    LineageD: An Interactive Visual System for Plant Cell Lineage Assignments based on Correctable Machine Learning
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2022) Hong, Jiayi; Trubuil, Alain; Isenberg, Tobias; Borgo, Rita; Marai, G. Elisabeta; Schreck, Tobias
    We describe LineageD-a hybrid web-based system to predict, visualize, and interactively adjust plant embryo cell lineages. Currently, plant biologists explore the development of an embryo and its hierarchical cell lineage manually, based on a 3D dataset that represents the embryo status at one point in time. This human decision-making process, however, is time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone due to the lack of integrated graphical support for specifying the cell lineage. To fill this gap, we developed a new system to support the biologists in their tasks using an interactive combination of 3D visualization, abstract data visualization, and correctable machine learning to modify the proposed cell lineage. We use existing manually established cell lineages to obtain a neural network model. We then allow biologists to use this model to repeatedly predict assignments of a single cell division stage. After each hierarchy level prediction, we allow them to interactively adjust the machine learning based assignment, which we then integrate into the pool of verified assignments for further predictions. In addition to building the hierarchy this way in a bottom-up fashion, we also offer users to divide the whole embryo and create the hierarchy tree in a top-down fashion for a few steps, improving the ML-based assignments by reducing the potential for wrong predictions. We visualize the continuously updated embryo and its hierarchical development using both 3D spatial and abstract tree representations, together with information about the model's confidence and spatial properties. We conducted case study validations with five expert biologists to explore the utility of our approach and to assess the potential for LineageD to be used in their daily workflow. We found that the visualizations of both 3D representations and abstract representations help with decision making and the hierarchy tree top-down building approach can reduce assignments errors in real practice.
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    Issues and Suggestions for the Development of a Biodiversity Data Visualization Support Tool
    (The Eurographics Association, 2018) Kaur, Pawandeep; Klan, Friederike; König-Ries, Birgitta; Jimmy Johansson and Filip Sadlo and Tobias Schreck
    Visualizations are an important tool to transport information. However, finding the right visualization can be challenging. Using the biodiversity research domain as a showcase, we investigate where exactly these challenges are and what a tool should look like that helps scientists overcome them. Our results are based on a survey we performed.
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    Neural Flow Map Reconstruction
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2022) Sahoo, Saroj; Lu, Yuzhe; Berger, Matthew; Borgo, Rita; Marai, G. Elisabeta; Schreck, Tobias
    In this paper we present a reconstruction technique for the reduction of unsteady flow data based on neural representations of time-varying vector fields. Our approach is motivated by the large amount of data typically generated in numerical simulations, and in turn the types of data that domain scientists can generate in situ that are compact, yet useful, for post hoc analysis. One type of data commonly acquired during simulation are samples of the flow map, where a single sample is the result of integrating the underlying vector field for a specified time duration. In our work, we treat a collection of flow map samples for a single dataset as a meaningful, compact, and yet incomplete, representation of unsteady flow, and our central objective is to find a representation that enables us to best recover arbitrary flow map samples. To this end, we introduce a technique for learning implicit neural representations of time-varying vector fields that are specifically optimized to reproduce flow map samples sparsely covering the spatiotemporal domain of the data. We show that, despite aggressive data reduction, our optimization problem - learning a function-space neural network to reproduce flow map samples under a fixed integration scheme - leads to representations that demonstrate strong generalization, both in the field itself, and using the field to approximate the flow map. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis across different datasets we show that our approach is an improvement across a variety of data reduction methods, and across a variety of measures ranging from improved vector fields, flow maps, and features derived from the flow map.
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    Visual Analysis of Charge Flow Networks for Complex Morphologies
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Kottravel, Sathish; Falk, Martin; Bin Masood, Talha; linares, mathieu; Hotz, Ingrid; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
    In the field of organic electronics, understanding complex material morphologies and their role in efficient charge transport in solar cells is extremely important. Related processes are studied using the Ising model and Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations resulting in large ensembles of stochastic trajectories. Naive visualization of these trajectories, individually or as a whole, does not lead to new knowledge discovery through exploration. In this paper, we present novel visualization and exploration methods to analyze this complex dynamic data, which provide succinct and meaningful abstractions leading to scientific insights. We propose a morphology abstraction yielding a network composed of material pockets and the interfaces, which serves as backbone for the visualization of the charge diffusion. The trajectory network is created using a novel way of implicitly attracting the trajectories to the skeleton of the morphology relying on a relaxation process. Each individual trajectory is then represented as a connected sequence of nodes in the skeleton. The final network summarizes all of these sequences in a single aggregated network. We apply our method to three different morphologies and demonstrate its suitability for exploring this kind of data.
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    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 von
    Aortic 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.
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    Robust Extraction and Simplification of 2D Symmetric Tensor Field Topology
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Jankowai, Jochen; Wang, Bei; Hotz, Ingrid; Gleicher, Michael and Viola, Ivan and Leitte, Heike
    In this work, we propose a controlled simplification strategy for degenerated points in symmetric 2D tensor fields that is based on the topological notion of robustness. Robustness measures the structural stability of the degenerate points with respect to variation in the underlying field. We consider an entire pipeline for generating a hierarchical set of degenerate points based on their robustness values. Such a pipeline includes the following steps: the stable extraction and classification of degenerate points using an edge labeling algorithm, the computation and assignment of robustness values to the degenerate points, and the construction of a simplification hierarchy. We also discuss the challenges that arise from the discretization and interpolation of real world data.
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    Curve Complexity Heuristic KD-trees for Neighborhood-based Exploration of 3D Curves
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Lu, Yucheng; Cheng, Luyu; Isenberg, Tobias; Fu, Chi-Wing; Chen, Guoning; Liu, Hui; Deussen, Oliver; Wang, Yunhai; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, Ivan
    We introduce the curve complexity heuristic (CCH), a KD-tree construction strategy for 3D curves, which enables interactive exploration of neighborhoods in dense and large line datasets. It can be applied to searches of k-nearest curves (KNC) as well as radius-nearest curves (RNC). The CCH KD-tree construction consists of two steps: (i) 3D curve decomposition that takes into account curve complexity and (ii) KD-tree construction, which involves a novel splitting and early termination strategy. The obtained KD-tree allows us to improve the speed of existing neighborhood search approaches by at least an order of magnitude (i. e., 28× for KNC and 12× for RNC with 98% accuracy) by considering local curve complexity. We validate this performance with a quantitative evaluation of the quality of search results and computation time. Also, we demonstrate the usefulness of our approach for supporting various applications such as interactive line queries, line opacity optimization, and line abstraction.
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    SurfNet: Learning Surface Representations via Graph Convolutional Network
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2022) Han, Jun; Wang, Chaoli; Borgo, Rita; Marai, G. Elisabeta; Schreck, Tobias
    For scientific visualization applications, understanding the structure of a single surface (e.g., stream surface, isosurface) and selecting representative surfaces play a crucial role. In response, we propose SurfNet, a graph-based deep learning approach for representing a surface locally at the node level and globally at the surface level. By treating surfaces as graphs, we leverage a graph convolutional network to learn node embedding on a surface. To make the learned embedding effective, we consider various pieces of information (e.g., position, normal, velocity) for network input and investigate multiple losses. Furthermore, we apply dimensionality reduction to transform the learned embeddings into 2D space for understanding and exploration. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SurfNet, we evaluate the embeddings in node clustering (node-level) and surface selection (surface-level) tasks. We compare SurfNet against state-of-the-art node embedding approaches and surface selection methods. We also demonstrate the superiority of SurfNet by comparing it against a spectral-based mesh segmentation approach. The results show that SurfNet can learn better representations at the node and surface levels with less training time and fewer training samples while generating comparable or better clustering and selection results.