B2LIC: An Algorithm for Mapping Two Scalar Values on Texture-Based Representations of Vector Fields

Abstract

Visualization of vector data produced from application areas such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), environmental sciences, and material engineering is a chal-lenging task. Texture-based methods reveal to be effective, versatile, and suitable for a large spectrum of applications since they allow to obtain high resolution output textures where direction, orientation, and magnitude of the flow can be displayed. In this paper we present a new method called B2LIC, which allows both to char-acterize and visualize interesting structures in the flow and to map two additional scalar values in output textures by bumps, depressions, and shadows, leaving colors for further information mapping. B2LIC is the natural and direct evolution and the improvement of the BUG (Bumped LIC) algorithm, which is able to map just one scalar value by the bump mapping technique. Some examples show how the proposed method can effectively allow to map two additional scalar values such as: temperature, vorticity, pressure, and so on, adding new and additional representa-tion capabilities to dense texture-based visualization methodologies.