Multi-dimensional filtering: Reducing the dimension through rotation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new SIAC line filter for flow visualization that reduces computational costs while maintaining accuracy, offering a practical alternative to tensor product filters in high-dimensional applications.

Contribution

The paper presents the SIAC line filter, analyzing its accuracy and efficiency, and demonstrating its advantages over traditional tensor product filters in visualization tasks.

Findings

Line filtering preserves tensor product filter properties.

Significant reduction in computational costs.

Achieves same accuracy with lower support size.

Abstract

Over the past few decades there has been a strong effort towards the development of Smoothness-Increasing Accuracy-Conserving (SIAC) filters for Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods, designed to increase the smoothness and improve the convergence rate of the DG solution through this post-processor. These advantages can be exploited during flow visualization, for example by applying the SIAC filter to the DG data before streamline computations [Steffan {\it et al.}, IEEE-TVCG 14(3): 680-692]. However, introducing these filters in engineering applications can be challenging since a tensor product filter grows in support size as the field dimension increases, becoming computationally expensive. As an alternative, [Walfisch {\it et al.}, JOMP 38(2);164-184] proposed a univariate filter implemented along the streamline curves. Until now, this technique remained a numerical experiment. In this paper we introduce the SIAC line filter and explore how the orientation, structure and filter size affect the order of accuracy and global errors. We present theoretical error estimates showing how line filtering preserves the properties of traditional tensor product filtering, including smoothness and improvement in the convergence rate. Furthermore, numerical experiments are included, exhibiting how these filters achieve the same accuracy at significantly lower computational costs, becoming an attractive tool for the scientific visualization community.