A NEW FAST LIC-LIKE FLOW VISUALIZATION METHOD WITH FLOW PATTERN ACCENTUATION AND DELINEATION ENHANCEMENT
Keqin Wu, Song Zhang, Robert J. Moorhead II · Journal of Flow Visualization and Image Processing · 2022
This paper introduces a new 2D Flow Visualization method to produce fast LIC-like images. The method is designed to combine characteristics of three classic flow visualization methods: the time efficiency of streamlines, the high definition of LIC images, and the succinct presentation of topology based methods. Starting with evenly-spaced streamline placement, the method varies the thickness of a streamline according to inter-streamline distance and generates multiple approximate sub-streamlines from a single streamline before texture-mapping, instead of directly texture-mapping a streamline as in previous methods. The flow direction information is effectively enhanced by applying different periodic intensities to discriminate between the neighboring sub-streamlines. Additionally, by simply exploiting the adjacency of streamlines, a new approach is introduced to depict the topological flow pattern intuitively. The algorithm is implemented on both a CPU and a GPU. The results on 2D flows and 3D surface flows show that the new algorithm produces competitive LIC-like effect, comprehensive flow information, and remarkable speedup over fast LIC.