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Scalar field visualization via extraction of symmetric structures

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Abstract

Identifying symmetry in scalar fields is a recent area of research in scientific visualization and computer graphics communities. Symmetry detection techniques based on abstract representations of the scalar field use only limited geometric information in their analysis. Hence they may not be suited for applications that study the geometric properties of the regions in the domain. On the other hand, methods that accumulate local evidence of symmetry through a voting procedure have been successfully used for detecting geometric symmetry in shapes. We extend such a technique to scalar fields and use it to detect geometrically symmetric regions in synthetic as well as real-world datasets. Identifying symmetry in the scalar field can significantly improve visualization and interactive exploration of the data. We demonstrate different applications of the symmetry detection method to scientific visualization: query-based exploration of scalar fields, linked selection in symmetric regions for interactive visualization, and classification of geometrically symmetric regions and its application to anomaly detection.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from Department of Science and Technology, India (SR/S3/EECE/0086/2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

    Talha Bin Masood & Dilip Mathew Thomas

  2. Department of Computer Science and Automation, Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

    Vijay Natarajan

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  1. Talha Bin Masood
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  2. Dilip Mathew Thomas
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  3. Vijay Natarajan
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Correspondence to Talha Bin Masood.

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Masood, T.B., Thomas, D.M. & Natarajan, V. Scalar field visualization via extraction of symmetric structures. Vis Comput 29, 761–771 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0828-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-013-0828-y

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