Path-line Oriented Visualization of Dynamical Flow Fields

Abstract

An effective visual representation of dynamical flow behavior is still a challenging problem of modern flow visualization. Path-lines are important characteristic curves of dynamical flow fields. In this thesis, we focus on the visual analysis of path-line behaviors and uncover the dynamical nature of a flow field. We propose a topological segmentation of periodic 2D time-dependent vector fields based on asymptotic path-line behaviors. A flow domain is classified into different areas based on the converging or diverging path-line behaviors relating to the identified critical path-lines. We also offer an alternative algorithm to extract the separation surfaces of the path-line oriented topological structure. For the interactive visual analysis of fluid motion, we propose an information visualization based approach to explore the dynamical flow behaviors. Attributes associated with path-lines are identified and analyzed and the interesting features or structures are extracted and visualized with human interaction. We also investigate the property transport phenomenon and propose an approach to visualize the finite-time transport structures of property advection which is similar to carry out a line integral convolution over physical properties along path-lines. We demonstrate our approaches on a number of applications and present some interesting results.