Illustrative Flow Visualization: State of the Art, Trends and Challenges

Abstract

Flow visualization is a well established branch of scientific visualization and it currently represents an invaluable resource to many fields, like automotive design, meteorology and medical imaging. Thanks to the capabilities of modern hardware, flow datasets are increasing in size and complexity, and traditional flow visualization techniques need to be updated and improved in order to deal with the upcoming challenges. A fairly recent trend to enhance the expressiveness of scientific visualization is to produce depictions of physical phenomena taking inspiration from traditional handcrafted illustrations: this approach is known as illustrative visualization, and it is getting a foothold in flow visualization as well. In this state of the art report we give an overview of the existing illustrative techniques for flow visualization, we highlight which problems have been solved and which issues still need further investigation, and, finally, we provide remarks and insights on the current trends in illustrative flow visualization.