Efficient Interpolation-based Pathline Tracing with B-spline Curves in Particle Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel interpolation-based particle pathline tracing method that uses B-spline curves to efficiently generate accurate pathlines in particle datasets, significantly reducing computation time.

Contribution

The paper proposes representing particle data with B-spline curves and interpolating control points to decrease the number of interpolation steps, improving efficiency over existing methods.

Findings

Achieves accurate pathline tracing with reduced computation time.

Demonstrates effectiveness on particle datasets.

Outperforms traditional neighborhood search methods.

Abstract

Particle tracing through numerical integration is a well-known approach to generating pathlines for visualization. However, for particle simulations, the computation of pathlines is expensive, since the interpolation method is complicated due to the lack of connectivity information. Previous studies utilize the k-d tree to reduce the time for neighborhood search. However, the efficiency is still limited by the number of tracing time steps. Therefore, we propose a novel interpolation-based particle tracing method that first represents particle data as B-spline curves and interpolates B-spline control points to reduce the number of interpolation time steps. We demonstrate our approach achieves good tracing accuracy with much less computation time.