Depth-Dependent Halos: Illustrative Rendering of Dense Line Data

February 10, 2010

in Critiques,Student Posts

Visualizing 3-Dimensional line data is an extremely tricky problem. Examples of such data are neuron connectivity information and fluid flow simulations. Below is a visualization of DTI fiber tracts in a human brain.

DTI fiber tracksThis visualization is able to correctly convey the connectivity information and at the same time adds depth cues in order to keep the three dimensional context. The paths are also bundled to give emphasis to general trends. I also like the fact that they use implicit perceptual cues ( the width of the halos around each line) and allow our visual system to perform the hard work of deciding what is in front of what. Previous approaches have tried to use realistic rendering, but because we rarely see such structures in real life, we have a hard time extracting the structure.

Here’s a link to the project page:

http://www.cs.rug.nl/~isenberg/VideosAndDemos/Everts2009DDH

The paper :

http://www.cs.rug.nl/~isenberg/personal/papers/Everts_2009_DDH.pdf

And additional high res images:

http://www.cs.rug.nl/~isenberg/uploads/VideosAndDemos/Everts_2009_DDH_supplemental_normal.pdf

There’s also a couple of link to videos in the project page. I encourage all to take a look at them.

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