Volume Conductor: Interactive Visibility Management for Crowded Volumes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a smart visibility system for crowded volumetric data that automatically sparsifies dense volumes, enabling clearer exploration of essential information through user-defined object groups and per-instance visibility control.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that manages visibility at the individual instance level based on membership predicates and view, improving clarity in dense volumetric visualizations.

Findings

Effective automatic sparsification of dense volumes.

Applicable to various domains like polymers and cellular structures.

Seamless integration into existing visualization tools.

Abstract

We present a novel smart visibility system for visualizing crowded volumetric data containing many object instances. The presented approach allows users to form groups of objects through membership predicates and to individually control the visibility of the instances in each group. Unlike previous smart visibility approaches, our approach controls the visibility on a per-instance basis and decides which instances are displayed or hidden based on the membership predicates and the current view. Thus, cluttered and dense volumes that are notoriously difficult to explore effectively are automatically sparsified so that the essential information is extracted and presented to the user. The proposed system is generic and can be easily integrated into existing volume rendering applications and applied to many different domains. We demonstrate the use of the volume conductor for visualizing fiber-reinforced polymers and intracellular organelle structures.