Visualization of 2D and 3D vector field
二维和三维矢量场的可视化

Vector field visualization can help people intuitively understand the two-dimensional and three-dimensional vector field. For two-dimensional vector field, the current methods of vector field visualization only provide the information about direction but not intensity. In addition, for the three-dimensional vector field, the vector field visualization result is not encouraging. This paper achieved two-dimensional and three-dimensional vector field visualization by the line integral convolution. In this paper we extend the idea of Bresenham line drawing algorithm to track the streamline on two-dimensional plane and in three-dimensional space. For each point either in the two-dimensional or the three-dimensional vector field our method will establish a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional table, respectively, to store the location of its previous and also next points along the streamline to remove the redundancy occurred from conventional streamline tracking methods. For the two-dimensional vector field, we applied the color transparency to the gray-scale LIC image and color coded motion amplitude image to enhance the motion strength on display. For the three-dimensional vector field, LIC was used to get the output texture pixels and the ray casting volume rendering method has been used to show the three-dimensional image. Simulation results show that patterns in the two-dimensional vector field and also in the three-dimensional vector field can be visualized clearly and intuitively.