Flow Visualization with Density Control

Abstract

In flow visualization, it remains challenging to flexibly explore local regions in 3D fields and uniformly display the structures of flow fields while preserving key features. To this end, this paper presents a novel method for streamline generation and selection for 2D and 3D flow fields via density control. Several levels of streamlines are divided by flow density. The lowest level is produced using an entropy-based seeding strategy and a grid-based filling procedure. It can generate uniform streamlines without loss of important structural information. Other levels are then generated by a streamline selection algorithm based on the average distance among streamlines. It could help users understand flow fields in a more flexible manner. For 3D fields, we further provide local density control and density control along any axis for users, which are helpful to explore the fields both globally and locally. Various experimental results validate our method.