4,557 research outputs found
Doctor of Philosophy
dissertationIn this dissertation, we advance the theory and practice of verifying visualization algorithms. We present techniques to assess visualization correctness through testing of important mathematical properties. Where applicable, these techniques allow us to distinguish whether anomalies in visualization features can be attributed to the underlying physical process or to artifacts from the implementation under verification. Such scientific scrutiny is at the heart of verifiable visualization - subjecting visualization algorithms to the same verification process that is used in other components of the scientific pipeline. The contributions of this dissertation are manifold. We derive the mathematical framework for the expected behavior of several visualization algorithms, and compare them to experimentally observed results in the selected codes. In the Computational Science & Engineering community CS&E, this technique is know as the Method of Manufactured Solution (MMS). We apply MMS to the verification of geometrical and topological properties of isosurface extraction algorithms, and direct volume rendering. We derive the convergence of geometrical properties of isosurface extraction techniques, such as function value and normals. For the verification of topological properties, we use stratified Morse theory and digital topology to design algorithms that verify topological invariants. In the case of volume rendering algorithms, we provide the expected discretization errors for three different error sources. The results of applying the MMS is another important contribution of this dissertation. We report unexpected behavior for almost all implementations tested. In some cases, we were able to find and fix bugs that prevented the correctness of the visualization algorithm. In particular, we address an almost 2 0 -year-old bug with the core disambiguation procedure of Marching Cubes 33, one of the first algorithms intended to preserve the topology of the trilinear interpolant. Finally, an important by-product of this work is a range of responses practitioners can expect to encounter with the visualization technique under verification
Affine Registration of label maps in Label Space
Two key aspects of coupled multi-object shape\ud
analysis and atlas generation are the choice of representation\ud
and subsequent registration methods used to align the sample\ud
set. For example, a typical brain image can be labeled into\ud
three structures: grey matter, white matter and cerebrospinal\ud
fluid. Many manipulations such as interpolation, transformation,\ud
smoothing, or registration need to be performed on these images\ud
before they can be used in further analysis. Current techniques\ud
for such analysis tend to trade off performance between the two\ud
tasks, performing well for one task but developing problems when\ud
used for the other.\ud
This article proposes to use a representation that is both\ud
flexible and well suited for both tasks. We propose to map object\ud
labels to vertices of a regular simplex, e.g. the unit interval for\ud
two labels, a triangle for three labels, a tetrahedron for four\ud
labels, etc. This representation, which is routinely used in fuzzy\ud
classification, is ideally suited for representing and registering\ud
multiple shapes. On closer examination, this representation\ud
reveals several desirable properties: algebraic operations may\ud
be done directly, label uncertainty is expressed as a weighted\ud
mixture of labels (probabilistic interpretation), interpolation is\ud
unbiased toward any label or the background, and registration\ud
may be performed directly.\ud
We demonstrate these properties by using label space in a gradient\ud
descent based registration scheme to obtain a probabilistic\ud
atlas. While straightforward, this iterative method is very slow,\ud
could get stuck in local minima, and depends heavily on the initial\ud
conditions. To address these issues, two fast methods are proposed\ud
which serve as coarse registration schemes following which the\ud
iterative descent method can be used to refine the results. Further,\ud
we derive an analytical formulation for direct computation of the\ud
"group mean" from the parameters of pairwise registration of all\ud
the images in the sample set. We show results on richly labeled\ud
2D and 3D data sets
The Topology ToolKit
This system paper presents the Topology ToolKit (TTK), a software platform
designed for topological data analysis in scientific visualization. TTK
provides a unified, generic, efficient, and robust implementation of key
algorithms for the topological analysis of scalar data, including: critical
points, integral lines, persistence diagrams, persistence curves, merge trees,
contour trees, Morse-Smale complexes, fiber surfaces, continuous scatterplots,
Jacobi sets, Reeb spaces, and more. TTK is easily accessible to end users due
to a tight integration with ParaView. It is also easily accessible to
developers through a variety of bindings (Python, VTK/C++) for fast prototyping
or through direct, dependence-free, C++, to ease integration into pre-existing
complex systems. While developing TTK, we faced several algorithmic and
software engineering challenges, which we document in this paper. In
particular, we present an algorithm for the construction of a discrete gradient
that complies to the critical points extracted in the piecewise-linear setting.
This algorithm guarantees a combinatorial consistency across the topological
abstractions supported by TTK, and importantly, a unified implementation of
topological data simplification for multi-scale exploration and analysis. We
also present a cached triangulation data structure, that supports time
efficient and generic traversals, which self-adjusts its memory usage on demand
for input simplicial meshes and which implicitly emulates a triangulation for
regular grids with no memory overhead. Finally, we describe an original
software architecture, which guarantees memory efficient and direct accesses to
TTK features, while still allowing for researchers powerful and easy bindings
and extensions. TTK is open source (BSD license) and its code, online
documentation and video tutorials are available on TTK's website
09251 Abstracts Collection -- Scientific Visualization
From 06-14-2009 to 06-19-2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09251 ``Scientific Visualization \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics.
During the seminar, over 50 international participants presented their current
research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of
the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of
seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section
describes the seminar topics and goals in general
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