A texture-based hardware-independent technique for time-varying volume flow visualization

Existing texture-based 3D flow visualization techniques, e.g., volume Line Integral Convolution (LIC), are either limited to steady flows or dependent on special-purpose graphics cards. In this paper we present a texture-based hardware-independent technique for time-varying volume flow visualization. It is based on our Accelerated Unsteady Flow LIC (AUFLIC) algorithm (Liu and Moorhead, 2005), which uses a flow-driven seeding strategy and a dynamic seeding controller to reuse pathlines in the value scattering process to achieve fast time-dependent flow visualization with high temporal-spatial coherence. We extend AUFLIC to 3D scenarios for accelerated generation of volume flow textures. To address occlusion, lack of depth cuing, and poor perception of flow directions within a dense volume, we employ magnitude-based transfer functions and cutting planes in volume rendering to clearly show the flow structure and the flow evolution.