FlowGraph: A compound hierarchical graph for flow field exploration

Abstract

Visual exploration of large and complex 3D flow fields is critically important for understanding many aero- and hydro-dynamical systems that dominate various physical and natural phenomena in the world. In this paper, we introduce the FlowGraph, a novel compound graph representation that organizes streamline clusters and spatial regions hierarchically for occlusion-free and controllable visual exploration. Our approach works with any seeding strategies as long as the domain is well covered and important flow features are captured. By transforming a flow field to a graph representation, we enable observation and exploration of the relationships among streamline clusters, spatial regions and their interconnection in the transformed space. The FlowGraph not only provides a visual mapping that abstracts streamline clusters and spatial regions in various levels of detail, but also serves as a navigation tool that guides flow field exploration and understanding. Through brushing and linking in conjunction with the spatial streamline view, we demonstrate the effectiveness of FlowGraph with several visual exploration and comparison tasks that can not be well accomplished using the streamline view alone. As occlusion and clutter are almost ubiquitous in 3D flows, the FlowGraph represents a promising direction for enhancing our ability to understand large and complex flow field data.