Philip J. Rhodes and Robert S. Laramee and R. Daniel Bergeron and Ted M. Sparr.
"Uncertainty Visualization Methods in Isosurface Rendering".
In EUROGRAPHICS 2003 Short Papers, pp. 83-88, 2003.


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Abstract:

We describe two techniques for rendering isosurfaces in multiresolution volume data such that the uncertainty (error) in the data is shown in the resulting visualization. In general the visualization of uncertainty in data is difficult, but the nature of isosurface rendering makes it amenable to an effective solution. In addition to showing the error in the data used to generate the isosurface, we also show the value of an additional data variate on the isosurface. The results combine multiresolution and uncertainty visualization techniques into a hybrid approach. Our technique is applied to multiresolution examples from the medical domain.

Summary:

In this paper, uncertainty visualization is added to isosurface rendering by mapping uncertainty values to one of three color parameters (hue, brightness, or saturation), or using texture. Mapping to a color parameter allows the user to choose the range of a single parameter, keeping the other two fixed. Because changes in hue are most visually noticeable, it is the recommend parameter to use since brightness is needed to decipher the shape of the isosurface. Texture can also be added to the rendering to show areas of uncertainty by adding texture and varying the opacity of the texture with uncertainty. The benefit of using texture is that the color mapping can be used for the display of another variate, since the texture interferes only slightly with the color parameters. Isosurface rendering is an ideal technique to apply uncertainty visualization since the visualized data has the same value, and thus this value does not need to be visualized, leaving a lot of options to visualize uncertainty.

Keywords:

Isosurface rendering, color mapping, texture mapping, multi resolution data, opacity mapping

Techniques:

Color mapping, texture with opacity mapping

Bibtex:

@InProceedings{ rhodes:2003:UVIR,
  author =      "Philip J. Rhodes and Robert S. Laramee and R. Daniel
                  Bergeron and Ted M. Sparr",
  title = 	"Uncertainty Visualization Methods in Isosurface
                  Rendering",
  booktitle =   "EUROGRAPHICS 2003 Short Papers",
  pages = 	"83-88",
  year = 	"2003",
}

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