Schulze, MaikGermer, TobiasRössl, ChristianTheisel, HolgerEitan Grinspun and Niloy Mitra2015-02-282015-02-2820121467-8659https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2012.03177.xThe generation of discrete stream surfaces is an important and challenging task in scientific visualization, which can be considered a particular instance of geometric modeling. The quality of numerically integrated stream surfaces depends on a number of parameters that can be controlled locally, such as time step or distance of adjacent vertices on the front line. In addition there is a parameter that cannot be controlled locally: stream surface meshes tend to show high quality, well-shaped elements only if the current front line is "globally" approximately perpendicular to the flow direction. We analyze the impact of this geometric property and present a novel solution a stream surface integrator that forces the front line to be perpendicular to the flow and that generates quaddominant meshes with well-shaped and well-aligned elements. It is based on the integration of a scaled version of the flow field, and requires repeated minimization of an error functional along the current front line. We show that this leads to computing the 1-dimensional kernel of a bidiagonal matrix: a linear problem that can be solved efficiently. We compare our method with existing stream surface integrators and apply it to a number of synthetic and real world data sets.I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]Computational Geometry and Object ModelingCurvesurfacesolidand object representations10.1111/j.1467-8659.2012.03177.x