Detecting vortical phenomena in vector data by medium-scale correlation

The detection of vortical phenomena in vector data is one of the key issues in many technical applications, in particular in flow visualization. Many existing approaches rely on purely local evaluation of the vector data. In order to overcome the limits of a local approach we choose to combine a local method with a correlation of a pre-defined generic vortex with the data in a medium-scale region. Two different concepts of a generic vortices were tested on various sets of flow velocity vector data. The approach is not limited to the two generic patterns suggested here. The method was found to successfully detect vortices in cases were other methods fail.