Exploring Time-Varying Multivariate Volume Data Using Matrix of Isosurface Similarity Maps

Journal Article · Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2019 · IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2018.2864808· OSTI ID:1510060

Tao, Jun ^[1]; Imre, Martin ^[1]; Wang, Chaoli ^[1]; Chawla, Nitesh V. ^[1]; Guo, Hanqi ^[2]; Sever, Gökhan ^[2]; Kim, Seung Hyun ^[3]

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1. Univ. of Notre Dame, IN (United States)
2. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
3. The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH (United States)

We present a novel visual representation and interface named the matrix of isosurface similarity maps (MISM) for effective exploration of large time-varying multivariate volumetric data sets. MISM synthesizes three types of similarity maps (i.e., self, temporal, and variable similarity maps) to capture the essential relationships among isosurfaces of different variables and time steps. Additionally, it serves as the main visual mapping and navigation tool for examining the vast number of isosurfaces and exploring the underlying time-varying multivariate data set. We present temporal clustering, variable grouping, and interactive filtering to reduce the huge exploration space of MISM. In conjunction with the isovalue and isosurface views, MISM allows users to identify important isosurfaces or isosurface pairs and compare them over space, time, and value range. More importantly, we introduce path recommendation that suggests, animates, and compares traversal paths for effectively exploring MISM under varied criteria and at different levels-of-detail. A silhouette-based method is applied to render multiple surfaces of interest in a visually succinct manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with case studies of several time-varying multivariate data sets and an ensemble data set, and evaluate our work with two domain experts.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357
• OSTI ID: 1510060
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 25, Issue 1; ISSN 1077-2626
• Publisher: IEEE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Time-varying multivariate data visualization
isosurface
path recommendation
similarity map
visual interface