SurfPatch: Enabling Patch Matching for Exploratory Stream Surface Visualization

TL;DR

SurfPatch introduces a hierarchical patch matching framework for exploratory visualization of stream surfaces in flow data, enabling flexible, multiscale analysis and improved surface selection.

Contribution

It presents a novel three-stage patch matching approach and an interactive interface for flow surface visualization, addressing placement and flexibility challenges.

Findings

Effective in steady and unsteady flow datasets

Enables multiscale, flexible surface querying

Improves surface analysis over existing methods

Abstract

Unlike their line-based counterparts, surface-based techniques have yet to be thoroughly investigated in flow visualization due to their significant placement, speed, perception, and evaluation challenges. This paper presents SurfPatch, a novel framework supporting exploratory stream surface visualization. To begin with, we translate the issue of surface placement to surface selection and trace a large number of stream surfaces from a given flow field dataset. Then, we introduce a three-stage process: vertex-level classification, patch-level matching, and surface-level clustering that hierarchically builds the connection between vertices and patches and between patches and surfaces. This bottom-up approach enables fine-grained, multiscale patch-level matching, sharply contrasts surface-level matching offered by existing works, and provides previously unavailable flexibility during querying. We design an intuitive visual interface for users to conveniently visualize and analyze the underlying collection of stream surfaces in an exploratory manner. SurfPatch is not limited to stream surfaces traced from steady flow datasets. We demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on stream surfaces produced from steady and unsteady flows as well as isosurfaces extracted from scalar fields. The code is available at https://github.com/adlsn/SurfPatch.