Real-time Reconstruction and Visualization of Flow Fields

In this book, the following aspects related to the exploration of flow fields have been investigated. Firstly, a novel reconstruction method has been developed, which uses a physics-based filter operation to generate a velocity field that is consistent with the underlying flow model described by the Navier-Stokes equations. Interactive steering of this process is achieved by exploiting programmable graphics hardware for numerical computations and visualization of 2D flow fields. Secondly, a new focus for particle tracing, so called anchor lines, has been introduced to analyze local flow features within the global flow context by visualizing how much particles separate over time. In particular, the benefit of employing the finite time Lyapunov exponent to guide the seeding of anchor lines has been demonstrated. Thirdly, a new method for interactive diffusion tensor visualization based on GPU particle tracing has been developed. The efficiency of all of the developed methods has been demonstrated on synthetic and real- world data sets.