New tomographic reconstruction and visualization techniques and applications to the plasmasphere

This dissertation focuses on developing and applying tomographic reconstruction and visualization techniques. The techniques are aimed at a space science application domain, the terrestrial plasmasphere. Three areas that support processing of data in the domain are considered.;The first area of focus is tomographic reconstruction. In this focus area, a new technique for reconstruction from a short sequence of images over a narrow range of viewing angles is introduced. The technique utilizes a nonlinear iterative approach and exploits physical models as additional constraints in the reconstruction. It is applied to reconstruction of the plasma density distribution of the plasmasphere from a short sequence of satellite images.;The second area of focus is development and investigation of algorithms that determine the 3D boundary of the plasmasphere from a silhouette of the plasmasphere in a single image.;The third area of focus is the analysis of one type of volume visualization, the isosurface extraction, which can be used in visualizing the reconstructions produced by the new reconstruction technique. The analysis considers the quantitative accuracy of isosurface extraction methods. A new metric that can measure the accuracy is also introduced.