ELIC and Streamline Injection Based High Quality Visualization for Time-Dependent Surface Flow Field

IBFVS is a classical method for visualizing time- dependent surface flow field, but the quality of the final image is inadequate to get a fully understanding for the visualized flow field. In order to improve the quality of the result image of IBFVS, this paper presents an enhanced IBFVS method based on short ELIC filtering and streamline fragments injection. We take IBFVS as the basic mechanism of our method, and use ELIC filtering and streamline injection to process the injected background image to increase the contrast of the result image. Experiment results show that our method generates a better visualization result than IBFVS and other improved methods. Keywords-component; IBFVS; enhanced line integral convolution; streamline; visualization; time-dependent flow field; I. INTRODUCTION Scientific visualization is very important in scientific research, and flow field visualization plays a central role in scientific visualization which is widely used in aircraft design, climate modeling and so on. We know that the data generated from scientific research are so large to analyze straightly, and some effective method such as visualization could be used to make these analyses quite easy and reveal the most important information. Among those visualization methods, texture-based visualization is a promising method compared with others due to its global representation of the whole dataset. IBFVS (Image based flow visualization for curved surfaces) is an efficient texture-based visualization method for visualizing time-dependent surface vector field, using which noise texture can flow smoothly along the direction of the vector. Although we can dynamically represent flow field with IBFVS, the final image is not clear enough to reveal the fully information carried by the flow field. To solve this inherent disadvantage, researchers use short LIC filter to increase the spatial coherence of the pixels along streamline, and this makes the lines along the streamline clearer. However, this method will decrease the high frequency of the noise, and consequently make the noise image move unnaturally. In this paper, we propose an enhanced IBFVS method based on short ELIC filtering and streamline fragment injection, which will obviously increase the spatial coherence along streamline and obtain a clear and smooth animation.