Contour-based Progressive Transmission of Cutting Plane Data

We present an efficient algorithm for progressive transmission of cutting plane data extracted from large scale Computational Field Simulation (CFS) datasets. Since cutting planes are the most frequently-used method for examination of 3D simulation results, efficient compression of both the geometry/topography and the associated field data is important for good visualization performance, especially when the simulation is running on a geographically remote server or the simulation results are stored in a remote repository. Progressive compression is ideal for exploratory visualization since the data can be presented naturally starting with a coarse view and progressing down to the detail. In our algorithm, each cutting plane, which is a triangle mesh, is reduced at the server to triangle strips which contain each contour location. On the local visualization machine (the client), the original surface is reconstructed by filling in the area between the triangle strips using a triangulation algorithm. The more contour lines used, the higher the accuracy of the reconstruction. This method has shown very good performance for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) datasets. It can quickly show an area of interest without modifying that section of the original triangle mesh. In generating the data to be sent to the client, the algorithm can smoothly trade-off computation and the accuracy of the representation by altering the cutting plane generation procedure or by adjusting the accuracy of the geometry/topology and the associated field data.