Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 41
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    Improved Sparse Seeding for 3D Electrostatic Field Lines
    (The Eurographics Association, 2015) Scharnowski, Katrin; Boblest, Sebastian; Ertl, Thomas; E. Bertini and J. Kennedy and E. Puppo
    We present an improved seeding strategy for sparse visualization of electrostatic fields. By analyzing the curvature of the field lines, we extract points of extremal field strength between charges of different sign and use them to seed field lines, which consequently connect the corresponding charges. The resulting sparse representation can be seen as an extension to classic vector field topology depicting properties otherwise hidden. Finally, by applying our method to a synthetic data set, we show its benefits over previously published work.
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    Visual Analysis of Two‐Phase Flow Displacement Processes in Porous Media
    (© 2022 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022) Frey, Steffen; Scheller, Stefan; Karadimitriou, Nikolaos; Lee, Dongwon; Reina, Guido; Steeb, Holger; Ertl, Thomas; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
    We developed a new visualization approach to gain a better understanding of the displacement of one fluid phase by another in porous media. This is based on a recent experimental parameter study with varying capillary numbers and viscosity ratios. We analyse the temporal evolution of characteristic values in this two‐phase flow scenario and discuss how to directly compare experiments across different temporal scales. To enable spatio‐temporal analysis, we introduce a new abstract visual representation showing which paths through the porous medium were occupied and for how long. These transport networks allow to assess the impact of different acting forces and they are designed to yield expressive comparability and linking to the experimental parameter space both supported by additional visual cues. This joint work of porous media experts and visualization researchers yields new insights regarding two‐phase flow on the microscale, and our visualization approach contributes towards the overarching goal of the domain scientists to characterize porous media flow based on capillary numbers and viscosity ratios.
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    Evaluation of Visualizations for Interface Analysis of SPH
    (The Eurographics Association, 2014) Krone, Michael; Huber, Markus; Scharnowski, Katrin; Hirschler, Manuel; Kauker, Daniel; Reina, Guido; Nieken, Ulrich; Weiskopf, Daniel; Ertl, Thomas; N. Elmqvist and M. Hlawitschka and J. Kennedy
    We present a GPU-accelerated visualization application that employs methods from computer graphics and visualizationto analyze SPH simulations from the field of material science. To this end, we extract the isosurfacethat separates the stable phases in a fluid mixture via the kernel function that was used by the simulation. Ourapplication enables the analysis of the separation process using interactive 3D renderings of the data and an additionalline chart that shows the computed surface area over time. This also allows us to validate the correctnessof the simulation method, since the surface area can be compared to the power law that describes the change inarea over time. Furthermore, we compare the isosurface that is based on the simulation kernel with an establishedmethod to extract smooth high-quality SPH surfaces. The comparison focuses on demonstrating the applicabilityfor data analysis in the context of material science, which is based on the resulting surface area and how wellthe two phases are separated with respect to the original particles. The evaluation was carried out together withexperts in material science.
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    Multi-attribute Visualization and Improved Depth Perception for the Interactive Analysis of 3D Truss Structures
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Becher, Michael; Groß, Anja; Werner, Peter; Maierhofer, Mathias; Reina, Guido; Ertl, Thomas; Menges, Achim; Weiskopf, Daniel; Hoellt, Thomas; Aigner, Wolfgang; Wang, Bei
    In architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), load-bearing truss structures are commonly modeled as a set of connected beam elements. For complex 3D structures, rendering beam elements as line segments presents several challenges due densely overlapping elements, including visual clutter, and general depth perception issues. Furthermore, line segments provide very little area for displaying additional element attributes. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of rendering effects for reducing visual clutter and improving depth perception for truss structures specifically, such as distance-based brightness attenuation and screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO). Additionally, we provide multiple options for multi-attribute visualization directly on the structure and evaluate both aspects with two expert interviews.
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    Air Quality Temporal Analyser: Interactive Temporal Analyses with Visual Predictive Assessments
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Harbola, Shubhi; Koch, Steffen; Ertl, Thomas; Coors, Volker; Dutta, Soumya and Feige, Kathrin and Rink, Karsten and Zeckzer, Dirk
    This work presents Air Quality Temporal Analyser (AQTA), an interactive system to support visual analyses of air quality data with time. This interactive AQTA allows the seamless integration of predictive models and detailed patterns analyses. While previous approaches lack predictive air quality options, this interface provides back-and-forth dialogue with the designed multiple Machine Learning (ML) models and comparisons for better visual predictive assessments. These models can be dynamically selected in real-time, and the user could visually compare the results in different time conditions for chosen parameters. Moreover, AQTA provides data selection, display, visualisation of past, present, future (prediction) and correlation structure among air parameters, highlighting the predictive models effectiveness. AQTA has been evaluated using Stuttgart (Germany) city air pollutants, i:e:, Particular Matter (PM) PM10, Nitrogen Oxide (NO), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), and Ozone (O3) and meteorological parameters like pressure, temperature, wind and humidity. The initial findings are presented that corroborate the city’'s COVID lockdown (year 2020) conditions and sudden changes in patterns, highlighting the improvements in the pollutants concentrations. AQTA, thus, successfully discovers temporal relationships among complex air quality data, interactively in different time frames, by harnessing the user's knowledge of factors influencing the past, present and future behavior, with the aid of ML models. Further, this study also reveals that the decrease in the concentration of one pollutant does not ensure that the surrounding air quality would improve as other factors are interrelated.
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    Voronoi-Based Foveated Volume Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Bruder, Valentin; Schulz, Christoph; Bauer, Ruben; Frey, Steffen; Weiskopf, Daniel; Ertl, Thomas; Johansson, Jimmy and Sadlo, Filip and Marai, G. Elisabeta
    Foveal vision is located in the center of the field of view with a rich impression of detail and color, whereas peripheral vision occurs on the side with more fuzzy and colorless perception. This visual acuity fall-off can be used to achieve higher frame rates by adapting rendering quality to the human visual system. Volume raycasting has unique characteristics, preventing a direct transfer of many traditional foveated rendering techniques. We present an approach that utilizes the visual acuity fall-off to accelerate volume rendering based on Linde-Buzo-Gray sampling and natural neighbor interpolation. First, we measure gaze using a stationary 1200 Hz eye-tracking system. Then, we adapt our sampling and reconstruction strategy to that gaze. Finally, we apply a temporal smoothing filter to attenuate undersampling artifacts since peripheral vision is particularly sensitive to contrast changes and movement. Our approach substantially improves rendering performance with barely perceptible changes in visual quality. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach through performance measurements on various data sets.
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    Interactive CPU-based Ray Tracing of Solvent Excluded Surfaces
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Rau, Tobias; Zahn, Sebastian; Krone, Michael; Reina, Guido; Ertl, Thomas; Kozlíková, Barbora and Linsen, Lars and Vázquez, Pere-Pau and Lawonn, Kai and Raidou, Renata Georgia
    Depictions of molecular surfaces such as the Solvent Excluded Surface (SES) can provide crucial insight into functional molecular properties, such as the molecule's potential to react. The interactive visualization of single and multiple molecule surfaces is essential for the data analysis by domain experts. Nowadays, the SES can be rendered at high frame rates using shader-based ray casting on the GPU. However, rendering large molecules or larger molecule complexes requires large amounts of memory that has the potential to exceed the memory limitations of current hardware. Here we show that rendering using CPU ray tracing also reaches interactive frame rates without hard limitations to memory. In our results large molecule complexes can be rendered with only the precomputation of each individual SES, and no further involved representation or transformation. Additionally, we provide advanced visualization techniques like ambient occlusion opacity mapping (AOOM) to enhance the comprehensibility of the molecular structure. CPU ray tracing not only provides very high image quality and global illumination, which is beneficial for the perception of spatial structures, it also opens up the possibility to visualize larger data sets and to render on any HPC cluster. Our results demonstrate that simple instancing of geometry keeps the memory consumption for rendering large molecule complexes low, so the examination of much larger data is also possible.
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    Efficient Sphere Rendering Revisited
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Gralka, Patrick; Reina, Guido; Ertl, Thomas; Bujack, Roxana; Pugmire, David; Reina, Guido
    Glyphs are an intuitive way of displaying the results of atomistic simulations, usually as spheres. Raycasting of camera-aligned billboards is considered the state-of-the-art technique to render large sets of spheres in a rasterization-based pipeline since the approach was first proposed by Gumhold. Over time various acceleration techniques have been proposed, such as the rendering of point primitives as billboards, which are trivial to rasterize and avoid a high workload in the vertex pipeline. Other techniques attempt to optimize data upload and access patterns in shader programs, both relevant aspects for dynamic data. Recent advances in graphics hardware raise the question of whether these optimizations are still valid. We evaluate several rendering and data access scheme combinations on real-world datasets and derive recommendations for efficient rasterization-based sphere rendering.
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    Interactive Hierarchical Quote Extraction for Content Insights
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Knittel, Johannes; Koch, Steffen; Ertl, Thomas; Madeiras Pereira, João and Raidou, Renata Georgia
    This work presents a new approach to visually summarize large micro-document collections such as tweets. We extract frequent patterns of phrases as shortened quotes to present analysts an overview of popular snippets and statements, enabling more specific insights into large text collections compared to keyword-based visualizations. In our hierarchical structure, each quote can be the starting point to extract more fine-grained patterns on a subset of sentences that match the parent pattern. We show that our approach is scalable by applying it to millions of tweets.
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    Visual Representation of Region Transitions in Multi-dimensional Parameter Spaces
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Fernandes, Oliver; Frey, Steffen; Reina, Guido; Ertl, Thomas; Agus, Marco and Corsini, Massimiliano and Pintus, Ruggero
    We propose a novel visual representation of transitions between homogeneous regions in multi-dimensional parameter space. While our approach is generally applicable for the analysis of arbitrary continuous parameter spaces, we particularly focus on scientific applications, like physical variables in simulation ensembles. To generate our representation, we use unsupervised learning to cluster the ensemble members according to their mutual similarity. In doing this, clusters are sorted such that similar clusters are located next to each other. We then further partition the clusters into connected regions with respect to their location in parameter space. In the visualization, the resulting regions are represented as glyphs in a matrix, indicating parameter changes which induce a transition to another region. To unambiguously associate a change of data characteristics to a single parameter, we specifically isolate changes by dimension. With this, our representation provides an intuitive visualization of the parameter transitions that influence the outcome of the underlying simulation or measurement. We demonstrate the generality and utility of our approach on diverse types of data, namely simulations from the field of computational fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, as well as an ensemble of raycasting performance data.