Guest editor's introduction: special section on visualization

Abstract

—————————— ✦ —————————— HIS issue contains extended versions of five outstanding papers from the IEEE Visualization ‘99 conference and the IEEE 1999 Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis ‘99) held in San Francisco, California. The authors of these papers were invited to significantly extend their work and submit journal quality papers for this special issue. The papers were then reviewed and revised according to suggestions by expert referees. These papers represent a sampling of the state-of-the-art research from a diverse collection of research areas presented at IEEE Visualization ‘99 and InfoVis ‘99. The first two papers discuss important systems issues and new techniques for visualization of large scale data sets. The next two papers discuss new techniques in classical areas of visualization research: flow visualization and medical visualization. The final paper presents new research in one of the newest areas of visualization research, information visualization. Systems issues and visualization performance are still important research problems because dataset sizes are growing just as rapidly (or more rapidly) than processor speed, data transfer rates, and memory capacity. Sutton and Hansen present a new data structure and algorithm for interactive visualization and isosurface extraction of timevarying datasets. Their Temporal-Branch-on-Need Octree reduces I/O bottlnecks and achieves high performance isosurface extraction for time-varying fields. New techniques for the time-critical rendering of high-complexity scenes is presented in the paper by Klosowski and Silva. Their system takes the approach of producing partially-correct images using a new visibility culling algorithm that can be used for time-critical rendering of visualization data, as well as architectural scenes and other geometric datasets. There are still many open research problems in classic application areas of visualization research. The paper by Kindlmann, Weinstein, and Hart presents new techniques for volume rendering medical data from a relatively new source, diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. They present extensions to previous volume visualization techniques, including barycentric opacity maps, hue-maps, and lit-tensors. Diewald, Preusser, and Rumpf present new techniques in another important area of visualization research: vector field visualization. Their work uses nonlinear anisotropic diffusion to aid the perception of complex flow pattens and flow fields. The work by Fua, Ward, and Rundensteiner presents new techniques in one of the newest areas of visualization research: information visualization. Their work on structure-based brushes helps to solve the navigation problem for visualization of hierarchically organized data. These five papers demonstrate the range of diverse research and the high-quality innovation presented at IEEE Visualization ‘99 and InfoVis ‘99.