Abstract
Line integral convolution (LIC) is an effective and powerful technique for generating images from vector fields. In the 3D-LIC, it is very important to select an adequate region of interest (ROI) in the vector field. A way for specifying ROI is to use a surface defined in the vector field. Another way is to use a significance setting that defines a ROI related values at each point in the vector field. To represent an anisotropic vector field around a vortex center in an understandable way, we introduced a time-oriented significance setting. Our technique for specifying ROI is to use a passage-time for a mass-less particle to travel from near a vortex center to a pixel location.
In our technique, what we call “restricted LIC technique”, we refer to the passage-time buffer before we start the convolution process at a pixel location. The original RLIC technique is based on 2 -D. In this paper, we extend this technique to 3 -D. To confirm the effectiveness of our technique, we use an anisotropic swirl vector field and construct two types of significance settings, which are a distance-oriented and a time-oriented setting. We will show the difference in the resulting images between a distance-oriented and time-oriented significance settings.
