Uncertain topology of 3D vector fields

Abstract

We present a technique to visualize global uncertainty in stationary 3D vector fields by a topological approach. We start from an existing approach for 2D uncertain vector field topology and extend this into 3D space. For this a number of conceptional and technical challenges in performance and visual representation arise. In order to solve them, we develop an acceleration for finding sink and source distributions. Having these distributions we use overlaps of their corresponding volumes to find separating structures and saddles. As part of the approach, we introduce uncertain saddle and boundary switch connectors and provide algorithms to extract them. For the visual representation, we use multiple direct volume renderings. We test our method on a number of synthetic and real data sets.