DevLan/vispubs huggingface dataset:
Context-Adaptive Mobile Visualization and Information Management
Authors: Jochen Ehret, Achim Ebert, Lars Schuchardt, Heidrun Steinmetz, Hans Hagen
Published at Vis, 2004

This poster abstract presents a scalable information visualization system for mobile devices and desktop systems. It is designed to support the operation and the workflow of wastewater systems. The regarded information data includes general information about buildings and units, process data, occupational safety regulations, work directions and first aid instructions in case of an accident. Technically, the presented framework combines visualization with agent technology in order to automatically scale various visualization types to fit on different platforms like PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) or Tablet PCs. The implementation is based on but not limited to SQL, JSP, HTML and VRML.
DaMI - Data Management for Multimedial Information Systems
Authors: Hans Hagen, Gerhard Steinebach, Michael Münchhofen, Inga Scheler, Maja Ruby, Michael Wadlé
Published at Vis, 2004

This paper describes a Data Management System for Multimedial Information Visualization called DaMI. It is possible to create 2D or 3D model based on data out of standard databases and additional metainformation. DaMI is a generic system guaranteeing an optimal reusability and compatibility.
Depth Enhanced Panoramas
Authors: Gleb Bahmutov, Voicu Popescu, Elisha Sacks
Published at Vis, 2004

We describe a method for interactive modeling and visualization of room-size indoor scenes that is fast, easy, and inexpensive. We have designed a novel data acquisition device, called a ModelCamera, that consists of a video camera with an attached laser system that generates a 7x7 pattern of depth samples. The operator pans and tilts the ModelCamera around the camera's center of projection and it acquires a sequence of color and depth frames. The frames are registered in world coordinates and are merged into an evolving scene model, called a depth enhanced panorama. The model is visualized continually; the immediate feedback allows the operator to monitor the model quality and to identify missing scene surfaces. Our approach extends color panoramas to support viewpoint translation, while retaining their speed, convenience, and low cost (Figure 1). It is a practical alternative to modeling systems that provide complete models at a high cost.
Detection and visualization of anomalous structures in molecular dynamics simulation data
Authors: Sameep Mehta, Kaden Hazzard, Raghu Machiraju, Srinivasan Parthasarathy 0001, John Wilkins
Published at Vis, 2004

We explore techniques to detect and visualize features in data from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Although the techniques proposed are general, we focus on silicon (Si) atomic systems. The first set of methods use 3D location of atoms. Defects are detected and categorized using local operators and statistical modeling. Our second set of exploratory techniques employ electron density data. This data is visualized to glean the defects. We describe techniques to automatically detect the salient isovalues for isosurface extraction and designing transfer functions. We compare and contrast the results obtained from both sources of data. Essentially, we find that the methods of defect (feature) detection are at least as robust as those based on the exploration of electron density for Si systems.
Dispersion simulation and visualization for urban security
Authors: Feng Qiu, Ye Zhao 0004, Zhe Fan, Xiaoming Wei, Haik Lorenz, Jianning Wang, Suzanne Yoakum-Stover, Arie E. Kaufman, Klaus Mueller 0001
Published at Vis, 2004

We present a system for simulating and visualizing the propagation of dispersive contaminants with an application to urban security. In particular, we simulate airborne contaminant propagation in open environments characterised by sky-scrapers and deep urban canyons. Our approach is based on the multiple relaxation time lattice Boltzmann model (MRTLBM), which can efficiently handle complex boundary conditions such as buildings. In addition, we model thermal effects on the flow field using the hybrid thermal MRTLBM. Our approach can also accommodate readings from various sensors distributed in the environment and adapt the simulation accordingly. We accelerate the computation and efficiently render many buildings with small textures on the GPU. We render streamlines and the contaminant smoke with self-shadowing composited with the textured buildings.
Display of vector fields using a reaction-diffusion model
Authors: Allen R. Sanderson, Christopher R. Johnson 0001, Robert M. Kirby
Published at Vis, 2004

Effective visualization of vector fields relies on the ability to control the size and density of the underlying mapping to visual cues used to represent the field. In this paper we introduce the use of a reaction-diffusion model, already well known for its ability to form irregular spatio-temporal patters, to control the size, density, and placement of the vector field representation. We demonstrate that it is possible to encode vector field information (orientation and magnitude) into the parameters governing a reaction-diffusion model to form a spot pattern with the correct orientation, size, and density, creating an effective visualization. To encode direction we texture the spots using a light to dark fading texture. We also show that it is possible to use the reaction-diffusion model to visualize an additional scalar value, such as the uncertainty in the orientation of the vector field. An additional benefit of the reaction-diffusion visualization technique arises from its automatic density distribution. This benefit suggests using the technique to augment other vector visualization techniques. We demonstrate this utility by augmenting a LIC visualization with a reaction-diffusion visualization. Finally, the reaction-diffusion visualization method provides a technique that can be used for streamline and glyph placement.
DTI Fiber Clustering in the Whole Brain
Authors: Song Zhang 0004, David H. Laidlaw
Published at Vis, 2004

References [1] Ding et al. Classification and quantification of neuronal fiber pathways using diffusion tensor MRI. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 49:716–721, 2003. [2] Corouge et al. Towards a shape model of white matter fiber bundles using diffusion tensor MRI. In International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, pages 344–347, 2004. [3] Zhang et al. Visualizing diffusion tensor MR images using streamtubes and streamsurfaces. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 9(4):454–462, October 2003. [4] Duda et al. Pattern Classification. Wiley-Interscience Publication, 2000. Introduction
Dual contouring with topology-preserving simplification using enhanced cell representation
Authors: Nan Zhang 0011, Wei Hong 0006, Arie E. Kaufman
Published at Vis, 2004

We present a fast, topology-preserving approach for isosurface simplification. The underlying concept behind our approach is to preserve the disconnected surface components in cells during isosurface simplification. We represent isosurface components in a novel representation, called enhanced cell, where each surface component in a cell is represented by a vertex and its connectivity information. A topology-preserving vertex clustering algorithm is applied to build a vertex octree. An enhanced dual contouring algorithm is applied to extract error-bounded multiresolution isosurfaces from the vertex octree while preserving the finest resolution isosurface topology. Cells containing multiple vertices are properly handled during contouring. Our approach demonstrates better results than existing octree-based simplification techniques.
Dual marching cubes
Authors: Gregory M. Nielson
Published at Vis, 2004

We present the definition and computational algorithms for a new class of surfaces which are dual to the isosurface produced by the widely used marching cubes (MC) algorithm. These new isosurfaces have the same separating properties as the MC surfaces but they are comprised of quad patches that tend to eliminate the common negative aspect of poorly shaped triangles of the MC isosurfaces. Based upon the concept of this new dual operator, we describe a simple, but rather effective iterative scheme for producing smooth separating surfaces for binary, enumerated volumes which are often produced by segmentation algorithms. Both the dual surface algorithm and the iterative smoothing scheme are easily implemented.
Efficient point-based isosurface exploration using the span-triangle
Authors: Bartosz von Rymon-Lipinski, Nils Hanssen, Thomas Jansen 0005, Lutz Ritter, Erwin Keeve
Published at Vis, 2004

We introduce a novel span-triangle data structure, based on the span-space representation for isosurfaces. It stores all necessary cell information for dynamic manipulation of the isovalue in an efficient way. We have found that using our data structure in combination with point-based techniques, implemented on graphics hardware, effects in real-time rendering and exploration. Our extraction algorithm utilizes an incremental and progressive update scheme, enabling smooth interaction without significant latency. Moreover, the corresponding visualization pipeline is capable of processing large data sets by utilizing all three levels of memory: disk, system and graphics. We address practical usability in actual medical applications, achieving a new level of interactivity.
Exploration of the brain's white matter pathways with dynamic queries
Authors: David Akers, Anthony J. Sherbondy, Rachel Mackenzie, Robert F. Dougherty, Brian A. Wandell
Published at Vis, 2004

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a magnetic resonance imaging method that can be used to measure local information about the structure of white matter within the human brain. Combining DTI data with the computational methods of MR tractography, neuroscientists can estimate the locations and sizes of nerve bundles (white matter pathways) that course through the human brain. Neuroscientists have used visualization techniques to better understand tractography data, but they often struggle with the abundance and complexity of the pathways. We describe a novel set of interaction techniques that make it easier to explore and interpret such pathways. Specifically, our application allows neuroscientists to place and interactively manipulate box-shaped regions (or volumes of interest) to selectively display pathways that pass through specific anatomical areas. A simple and flexible query language allows for arbitrary combinations of these queries using Boolean logic operators. Queries can be further restricted by numerical path properties such as length, mean fractional anisotropy, and mean curvature. By precomputing the pathways and their statistical properties, we obtain the speed necessary for interactive question-and-answer sessions with brain researchers. We survey some questions that researchers have been asking about tractography data and show how our system can be used to answer these questions efficiently.
Fast Rendering of Foveated Volume in the Wavelet Domain
Authors: Hang Yu, Ee-Chien Chang, Zhiyong Huang, Zhijian Zheng
Published at Vis, 2004

A design issue in remote visualization is on the mapping of the viewer’s intention to the relevant data to be sent. One possible approach is to let the viewer interactively indicate the region of interests (ROI), and objects in the ROI will have higher priority during transmission. For media objects like images and video, foveation has been used to formulate the priority of spatial information. Foveation can be treated as a way to distribute information across the space, in order to have wide coverage and yet high concentration in the interesting location. There are a number of works on image transmission and video encing exploiting the compression rate provided by foveation [Basu et 1993; Basu and Wiebe 1998; Chang et al. 20001. From another perspective, foveation can be viewed as a way to distribute computing resources across space. For example, Levoy et [Levoy and Whitaker propose to use foveation to speed up volume rendering. In this paper, we presented a novel algorithm for fast rendering volumes with special structure: foveated volumes. Our major contribution is to exploit the implicit structure of the foveated volume, different from other types of data, t o accelerate the volume rendering. We render a foveated volume directly in the Wavelet domain, and its running time depends mainly on the number of relevant coefficients. Potentially, foveation can be exploited in remote volume visualization to give a fast rendering that does not depend on the size of the full resolution volume.
Flow field clustering via algebraic multigrid
Authors: Michael Griebel, Tobias Preußer, Martin Rumpf, Marc Alexander Schweitzer, Alexandru C. Telea
Published at Vis, 2004

We present a novel multiscale approach for flow visualization. We define a local alignment tensor that encodes a measure for alignment to the direction of a given flow field. This tensor induces an anisotropic differential operator on the flow domain, which is discretized with a standard finite element technique. The entries of the corresponding stiffness matrix represent the anisotropically weighted couplings of adjacent nodes of the domain mesh. We use an algebraic multigrid algorithm to generate a hierarchy of fine to coarse descriptions for the above coupling data. This hierarchy comprises a set of coarse grid nodes, a multiscale of basis functions and their corresponding supports. We use these supports to obtain a multilevel decomposition of the flow structure. Standard streamline icons are used to visualize this decomposition at any user-selected level of detail. The method provides a single framework for vector field decomposition independent on the domain dimension or mesh type. Applications are shown in 2D, for flow fields on curved surfaces, and for 3D volumetric flow fields.
Force-Feedback-Enhanced Navigation for Interactive Visualization of Coronary Vessels
Authors: Thomas Wischgoll, Elke Moritz, Jörg Meyer 0002
Published at Vis, 2004

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the number one killer in the United States. Although it is well known that CHD mainly occurs due to blocked arteries, there are contradictory results from studies designed to identify basic causes for this common disease is. To find out more about the true reason for CHD, virtual models can be employed to better understand the way the heart functions. With such a model, scientists and surgeons are able to analyze the effects of different treatment options, and ultimately find more suited ways to prevent coronary heart diseases. To investigate a given model, appropriate navigation methods are required, including suitable input devices. For the visualization, graphics cards originally designed for gaming applications are used; so, it is a just natural transition to adapt gaming input devices to a visualization system for controlling of the navigation. These devices are usually well designed with respect to ergonomics and durability, yielding more degrees of freedom in steering than two-dimensional input devices, such as desktop mice. This poster describes a visualization system that provides the user with advanced control devices for navigation enabling interactive exploration of the model. Force-feedback and sound effects provide additional cues.
Generating realistic images from hydrothermal plume data
Authors: Kristina Santilli, Karen G. Bemis, Deborah Silver, Jamshed Dastur, Peter A. Rona
Published at Vis, 2004

Most data used in the study of seafloor hydrothermal plumes consists of sonar (acoustic) scans and sensor readings. Visual data captures only a portion of the sonar data range due to the prohibitive cost and physical infeasibility of taking sufficient lighting and video equipment to such extreme depths. However, visual images are available from research dives and from the recent IMAX movie, volcanoes of the deep sea. In this application paper, we apply existing lighting models with forward scattering and light attenuation to the 3D sonar data in order to mimic the visual images available. These generated images are compared to existing visual images. This can help the geoscientists understand the relationship between these different data modalities and elucidate some of the mechanisms used to capture the data.
Generating sub-resolution detail in images and volumes using constrained texture synthesis
Authors: Lujin Wang, Klaus Mueller 0001
Published at Vis, 2004

A common deficiency of discretized datasets is that detail beyond the resolution of the dataset has been irrecoverably lost. This lack of detail becomes immediately apparent once one attempts to zoom into the dataset and only recovers blur. We describe a method that generates the missing detail from any available and plausible high-resolution data, using texture synthesis. Since the detail generation process is guided by the underlying image or volume data and is designed to fill in plausible detail in accordance with the coarse structure and properties of the zoomed-in neighborhood, we refer to our method as constrained texture synthesis. Regular zooms become "semantic zooms", where each level of detail stems from a data source attuned to that resolution. We demonstrate our approach by a medical application - the visualization of a human liver - but its principles readily apply to any scenario, as long as data at all resolutions are available. We first present a 2D viewing application, called the "virtual microscope", and then extend our technique to 3D volumetric viewing.
Guaranteed quality triangulation of molecular skin surfaces
Authors: Ho-Lun Cheng, Xinwei Shi
Published at Vis, 2004

We present an efficient algorithm to mesh the macromolecules surface model represented by the skin surface defined by Edelsbrunner. Our algorithm overcomes several challenges residing in current surface meshing methods. First, we guarantee the mesh quality with a provable lower bound of 21/spl deg/ on its minimum angle. Second, we ensure the triangulation is homeomorphic to the original surface. Third, we improve the efficiency of constructing the restricted Delaunay triangulation (RDT) of smooth surfaces. We achieve this by constructing the RDT using the advancing front method without computing the Delaunay tetrahedrization of the sample points on the surfaces. The difficulty of handling the front collision problem is tackled by employing the Morse theory. In particular, we construct the Morse-Smale complex to simplify the topological changes of the front. Our implementation results suggest that the algorithm decrease the time of generating high quality homeomorphic skin mesh from hours to a few minutes.
Haptic display of interaction between textured models
Authors: Miguel A. Otaduy, Nitin Jain, Avneesh Sud, Ming C. Lin
Published at Vis, 2004

Surface texture is among the most salient haptic characteristics of objects; it can induce vibratory contact forces that lead to perception of roughness. We present a new algorithm to display haptic texture information resulting from the interaction between two textured objects. We compute contact forces and torques using low-resolution geometric representations along with texture images that encode surface details. We also introduce a novel force model based on directional penetration depth and describe an efficient implementation on programmable graphics hardware that enables interactive haptic texture rendering of complex models. Our force model takes into account important factors identified by psychophysics studies and is able to haptically display interaction due to fine surface textures that previous algorithms do not capture.
Hardware-accelerated adaptive EWA volume splatting
Authors: Wei Chen 0001, Ren Liu, Matthias Zwicker, Hanspeter Pfister
Published at Vis, 2004

We present a hardware-accelerated adaptive EWA (elliptical weighted average) volume splatting algorithm. EWA splatting combines a Gaussian reconstruction kernel with a low-pass image filter for high image quality without aliasing artifacts or excessive blurring. We introduce a novel adaptive filtering scheme to reduce the computational cost of EWA splatting. We show how this algorithm can be efficiently implemented on modern graphics processing units (GPUs). Our implementation includes interactive classification and fast lighting. To accelerate the rendering we store splat geometry and 3D volume data locally in GPU memory. We present results for several rectilinear volume datasets that demonstrate the high image quality and interactive rendering speed of our method.
Hierarchy Based 3D Visualization of Large Software Structures
Authors: Michael Balzer, Oliver Deussen
Published at Vis, 2004

Modern object-oriented programs are hierarchical systems with many thousands of interrelated subsystems. Visualization helps developers to better comprehend these large and complex systems. This work presents a three-dimensional visualization technique that represents the static structure of object-oriented software using distributions of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane. The visual complexity is reduced by adjusting the transparency of object surfaces to the distance of the viewpoint. An approach called Hierarchical Net is proposed for a clear representation of the relationships between the subsystems.
ImageSurfer: a tool for visualizing correlations between two volume scalar fields
Authors: Dennis Jen, Peter Parente, Jonathan Robbins, Chris Weigle, Russell M. Taylor II, Alain Burette, Richard Weinberg
Published at Vis, 2004

ImageSurfer is a tool designed to explore correlations between two 3D scalar fields. Our scientific goal was to determine where a protein is located, and how much its concentration varies along the membrane of a neuronal dendrite. The 3D scalar field data sets fall into two categories: dendritic plasma membranes (defining the structure) and immunofluorescent staining (defining protein concentration along the structure). ImageSurfer enables scientists to analyze relationships between multiple data sets obtained with confocal microscopy by providing 3D surface view, height field, and graphing tools. Each tool reduces the complexity of the problem by extracting a restricted subset of data: finding a region of interest in 3D; getting a sense of relative concentrations in 2D, and getting exact concentration values in 1D. The current design is presented, along with the rationale for each design decision. The tool is already proving useful for data exploration, analysis, and presentation.
Immersive design of DNA molecules with a tangible interface
Authors: Steven Schkolne, Hiroshi Ishii 0001, Peter Schröder
Published at Vis, 2004

This work presents an experimental immersive interface for designing DNA components for application in nanotechnology. While much research has been done on immersive visualization, this is one of the first systems to apply advanced interface techniques to a scientific design problem. This system uses tangible 3D input devices (tongs, a raygun, and a multipurpose handle tool) to create and edit a purely digital representation of DNA. The tangible controllers are associated with functions (not data) while a virtual display is used to render the model. This interface was built in collaboration with a research group investigating the design of DNA tiles. A user study shows that scientists find the immersive interface more satisfying than a 2D interface due to the enhanced understanding gained by directly interacting with molecules in 3D space.