On-Tube Attribute Visualization for Multivariate Trajectory Data

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Abstract

Stylized tubes are an established visualization primitive for line data as encountered in many scientific fields, ranging from characteristic lines in flow fields, fiber tracks reconstructed from diffusion tensor imaging, to trajectories of moving objects as they arise from cyber-physical systems in many engineering disciplines. Typical challenges include large data set sizes demanding for efficient rendering techniques as well as a large number of attributes that cannot be mapped simultaneously to the basic visual attributes provided by a tube-based visualization. In this work, we tackle both challenges with a new on-tube visualization approach. We improve recent work on high-quality GPU ray casting of Hermite spline tubes supporting ambient occlusion and extend it by a new layered procedural texturing technique. In the proposed framework, a large number of data set attributes can be mapped simultaneously to a variety of glyphs and plots that are embedded in texture space and organized in layers. Efficient rendering with minimal data transfer is achieved by generating the glyphs procedurally and drawing them in a deferred shading pass. We integrated these techniques in a prototype visualization tool that facilitates flexible mapping of data set attributes to visual tube and glyph attributes. We studied our approach on a variety of example data from different fields and found it to provide a highly adaptable and extensible toolbox to quickly craft tailor-made tube-based trajectory visualizations.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1288-1298
Number of pages11
JournalIEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics
Volume29
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

PubMed 36170405
ORCID /0000-0002-2176-876X/work/159171485

Keywords

Keywords

  • Line Data, Multivariate Data, Rendering, Trajectories, Visualization