A Flow Visualization Method Based On Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation Of Streamlines

Scientific visualization was proposed late eighties of the twentieth century and then it developed rapidly. Currently, it has been widely used in many areas such as medical, weather forecasting, molecular biology and so on, and attracts more and more attention. Flow field visualization is a classic research in scientific visualization field and it has wide applications such as fluid dynamics, weather forecasting, detonation data simulations and so on. In all of the flow visualization methods, streamlines visualization method has advantages of clearness and simpleness. So it is widely studied and applied.Generally, we evaluate visualization results of the streamlines methods based on Three principles:coverage, uniformity and continuity. Currently, the algorithms based on streamlines can be divided into two categories:Image guided algorithms and Direct seeding algorithms. The above algorithms meet Three Principles to some extent but not all. Most of them complete the placement within one pass and cannot optimize the streamlines once they are seeded. Thus, how to meet all of three principles is becoming a key issue.As Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation has the characteristic of evenly distributed in a given area, we introduced the concept of Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation to the scientific visualization field, and then we proposed a streamline method based on the Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation of streamlines, which can simultaneously achieve good results on coverage, uniformity and continuity.The main point of the paper work and innovation as follows:1. A generalization of Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation for streamlines.2. An algorithm for computing the Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation for streamlines using a variational characterization.3.A new streamline placement strategy based on the Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation of streamlines, which optimizes the placement of streamlines iteratively.4.A new streamline placement strategy based on the density of the flow field, feature points and the Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation of streamlines, which can give a better visualization result when the flow field is complex.Through theoretical and experimental analysis, the flow visualization method based on the Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation of streamlines can get a good result in Three principles. Other research and techniques, such as quantitative comparison in Three principles, obtain flow field density, visualization of dynamic flow field and so on are the future work.