Christopher S. Co

Using Difference Intervals for Time-Varying Isosurface Visualization

We present a novel approach to out-of-core time-varying isosurface visualization. We attempt to interactively visualize time-varying datasets which are too large to fit into main memory using a technique which is dramatically different from existing algorithms. Inspired by video encoding techniques, we examine the data differences between time steps to extract isosurface information. We exploit span space extraction techniques to retrieve operations necessary to update isosurface geometry from neighboring time steps. Because only the changes between time steps need to be retrieved from disk, I/O bandwidth requirements are minimized. We apply temporal compression to further reduce disk access and employ a point-based previewing technique that is refined in idle interaction cycles. Our experiments on computational simulation data indicate that this method is an extremely viable solution to large time-varying isosurface visualization. Our work advances the state-of-the-art by enabling all isosurfaces to be represented by a compact set of operations

Isosurface extraction using fixed-sized buckets

We present a simple and output optimal algorithm for accelerated isosurface extraction from volumetric data sets. Output optimal extraction algorithms perform an amount of work dominated by the size of the (output) isosurface rather than the size of the (input) data set. While several optimal methods have been proposed to accelerate isosurface extraction, these algorithms are relatively complicated to implement or require quantized values as input. Our method is based on a straightforward array data structure that only requires an auxiliary sorting routine for construction. The method works equally well for floating point data as it does for quantized data sets. We demonstrate how the data structure can exploit coherence between isosurfaces by performing searches incrementally. We show results for real application data validating the methods optimality.

Streaming Aerial Video Textures.

We present a streaming compression algorithm for huge time-varying aerial imagery. New airborne optical sensors are capable of collecting billion-pixel images at multiple frames per second. These images must be transmitted through a low-bandwidth pipe requiring aggressive compression techniques. We achieve such compression by treating foreground portions of the imagery separately from background portions. Foreground information consists of moving objects, which form a tiny fraction of the total pixels. Background areas are compressed effectively over time using streaming wavelet analysis to compute a compact video texture map that represents several frames of raw input images. This map can be rendered efficiently using an algorithm amenable to GPU implementation. The core algorithmic contributions of this work are methods for fast, low-memory streaming wavelet compression and efficient display of wavelet video textures resulting from such compression.