Automatic Detection and Visualization of Distinctive Structures in 3D Unsteady Multi-fields

Abstract

Current unsteady multi-field simulation data-sets consist of millions of data-points. To efficiently reduce this enormous amount of information, local statistical complexity was recently introduced as a method that identifies distinctive structures using concepts from information theory. Due to high computational costs this method was so far limited to 2D data. In this paper we propose a new strategy for the computation that is substantially faster and allows for a more precise analysis. The bottleneck of the original method is the division of spatio-temporal configurations in the field (light-cones) into different classes of behavior. The new algorithm uses a density-driven Voronoi tessellation for this task that more accurately captures the distribution of configurations in the sparsely sampled high-dimensional space. The efficient computation is achieved using structures and algorithms from graph theory. The ability of the method to detect distinctive regions in 3D is illustrated using flow and weather simulations.