Topology exploration with hierarchical landscapes

  • Authors:

  • Dogan Demir;Kenes Beketayev;Gunther H. Weber;Peer-Timo Bremer;Valerio Pascucci;Bernd Hamann

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Utah;Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Davis;Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory;Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory;University of Utah;University of California, Davis

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Workshop at SIGGRAPH Asia
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Topological landscapes have been proposed as a visual metaphor for contour trees that does not require an understanding of the theory involved in defining contour trees. The idea is to create a representative terrain with the same topological structure as a given contour tree. This representation exploits the natural human ability to interpret topography and results in an intuitive visualization of otherwise abstract information. However, topological landscapes still suffer from some of the same limitations as traditional contour tree visualization. Most notable is the fact that for complex functions landscapes can quickly become highly complex, exceeding the limits of human comprehension as well as the available computing resources. To address this challenge, we propose a new framework for the dynamic creation and visualization of hierarchical topological landscapes. Our system provides an interactive visualization of complex functions by utilizing a hierarchical decomposition of the contour tree as well as focus+context type interactions. For three dimensional data, we link the landscape display to flexible isosurface extraction in order to correlate terrain features with their corresponding three dimensional counterparts. We demonstrate the utility and versatility of our approach on a variety of both low and high dimensional data sets.