Scalable multivariate volume visualization and analysis

Abstract

In this work, we present an effective and scalable system for multivariate volume data visualization and analysis with a novel Transfer Function (TF) interface design that tightly couples parallel coordinates plots (PCP) and MDS-based dimension projection plots. In our system, the PCP visualizes the data distribution of each variate and the MDS plots project features. Together, they are integrated seamlessly to provide flexible feature classification without context switching between different data presentations during the user interaction. The proposed interface enables users to identify relevant correlation clusters and assign optical properties on them. To further support large scale multivariate volume data visualization and analysis, we develop three integrated parallel systems to accelerate the rendering of PCP, the layout of MDS, as well as parallel rendering of multivarite volume data. Our experiments show that the system is effective in multivariate volume data visualization and its performance is scalable for data sets with different sizes and number of variates.