Abstract
In this paper, we present a volume rendering framework for visualizing 3D flow fields. We introduce the concept of coherence field which evaluates the representativeness of a given streamline set for the underlying 3D vector field. Visualization of the coherence field can provide effective visual feedback to the user for incremental insertion of more streamline seeds. Given an initial set of streamlines, a coherence volume is constructed from a distance field to measure the similarity between the existing streamlines and those in their nearby regions based on the difference between the approximate and the actual vector directions. With the visual feedback obtained from rendering the coherence volume, new streamline seeds can be selected by the user or by a heuristic seed selection algorithm to adaptively improve the coherence volume. An improved volume rendering technique that can render user-defined appearance textures is proposed to facilitate macro-visualization of 3D vector fields.
