Image Space Advection on Graphics Hardware


 		    
Abstract:

The scientific visualization and computer graphics communities have witnessed a tremendous rise in graphics processing unit (GPU) related literature and methodology recently. This is due in part to the rapidly increasing processing speed offered by graphics cards. Parallel to this, we have seen several advances made in the area of texture-based flow visualization. We present a texture-based flow visualization technique, Image Space Advection (ISA), that takes advantage of the computing power offered by recent, state-of-theart GPUs. We have implemented a completely GPU-based version of the ISA algorithm. Here we describe our implementation in detail, including both the advantages and disadvantages of implementing ISA on the GPU. The result is state-of-the-art technique that demonstrates the latest in terms of both flow visualization methodology and GPU programming.

Project: This work has been carried out at Graz University of Technology in collaboration with the application research project multi-disciplanary visualization in the VRVis Research Center, which is funded by the Austrian research program Kplus as well as the private company AVL.
Papers: Image Space Advection on Graphics Hardware, by Markus Grabner and Robert S. Laramee, Proceedings of the 21st Spring Conference on Computer Graphics and its Applications 2005 (SCCG 2005), pages 75-82 May 12-14 2005, Budmerice, Slovakia ( PDF file ) Image Space Advection on Graphics Hardware, by Markus Grabner and Robert S. Laramee, TR-VRVis-2005-002, Techinical Report, VRVis Research Center, Vienna Austria ( PDF file )
Result Images:

Velocity Images: flow vectors encoded in the red and green color channels for two successive frames.

Resampling the flow image of the previous frame to the geometry of the current frame. Normally the camera does not move this much between frames, this is for illustration.

Image space advection and noise injection: (a) advection is performed on the resampled image, (b) the noise image (replaced by a checkerboard pattern) is extracted from texture memory, (c) both images are superimposed according to a user-defined ratio.

Shading and color overlay applied to the output of the advection and noise injection stage.

Visualization of flow at the complex boundary surface of a cooling jacket. Color is mapped to velocity magnitude.

Flow at the boundary surface of the ring data set visualized using different numbers of convolution steps. Low resolution images were intentionally selected for better illustration of the resulting artefacts.

Result Animation(s): (click on image for animation)

Dense visualization of flow at the boundary surface of a ring at fast frame rates (AVI format).

This page is maintained by Robert S. Laramee. 
In case of questions, comments, collaboration ideas etc., please send email to Laramee "at" VRVis.at