Multiresolution flow visualization
Bruno Jobard, Wilfrid Lefer · Digital Library (University of West Bohemia) · 2001
Flow visualization has been an active research field for several years and various techniques have been proposed to visualize vector fields, streamlines and textures being the most effective and popular ones. While streamlines are suitable to get rough information on the behavior of the flow, textures depict the flow properties at the pixel level. Depending on the situation the suitable representation could be streamlines or texture. This paper presents a method to compute a sequence of streamline-based images of a vector field with different densities, ranging from sparse to texturelike representations. It is based on an effective streamline placement algorithm and a production scheme that recalls those used in the multiresolution theory. Indeed a streamline defined at level J of the hierarchy is defined for all levels J’>J. A viewer allows us to interactively select the desired density while zooming in and out in a vector field. The density of streamlines in the image can also be automatically computed as a function of a derived quantity, such as velocity or vorticity.