Interactive Volume Visualization of General Polyhedral Grids

Philipp Muigg, Markus Hadwiger, Helmut Doleisch, Meister Eduard Gröller
Interactive Volume Visualization of General Polyhedral Grids
IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 17(12):2115-2124, December 2011.
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Abstract

This paper presents a novel framework for visualizing volumetric data specified on complex polyhedral grids, without the need to perform any kind of a priori tetrahedralization. These grids are composed of polyhedra that often are non-convex and have an arbitrary number of faces, where the faces can be non-planar with an arbitrary number of vertices. The importance of such grids in state-of-the-art simulation packages is increasing rapidly. We propose a very compact, face-based data structure for representing such meshes for visualization, called two-sided face sequence lists (TSFSL), as well as an algorithm for direct GPU-based ray-casting using this representation. The TSFSL data structure is able to represent the entire mesh topology in a 1D TSFSL data array of face records, which facilitates the use of efficient 1D texture accesses for visualization. In order to scale to large data sizes, we employ a mesh decomposition into bricks that can be handled independently, where each brick is then composed of its own TSFSL array. This bricking enables memory savings and performance improvements for large meshes. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach with real-world application results, by visualizing highly complex polyhedral data from commercial state-of-the-art simulation packages.

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@article{muigg-2011-gpg,
  title =      "Interactive Volume Visualization of General Polyhedral Grids",
  author =     "Philipp Muigg and Markus Hadwiger and Helmut Doleisch and
               Meister Eduard Gr{\"o}ller",
  year =       "2011",
  abstract =   "This paper presents a novel framework for visualizing
               volumetric data specified on complex polyhedral grids,
               without the need to perform any kind of a priori
               tetrahedralization. These grids are composed of polyhedra
               that often are non-convex and have an arbitrary number of
               faces, where the faces can be non-planar with an arbitrary
               number of vertices. The importance of such grids in
               state-of-the-art simulation packages is increasing rapidly.
               We propose a very compact, face-based data structure for
               representing such meshes for visualization, called two-sided
               face sequence lists (TSFSL), as well as an algorithm for
               direct GPU-based ray-casting using this representation. The
               TSFSL data structure is able to represent the entire mesh
               topology in a 1D TSFSL data array of face records, which
               facilitates the use of efficient 1D texture accesses for
               visualization. In order to scale to large data sizes, we
               employ a mesh decomposition into bricks that can be handled
               independently, where each brick is then composed of its own
               TSFSL array. This bricking enables memory savings and
               performance improvements for large meshes. We illustrate the
               feasibility of our approach with real-world application
               results, by visualizing highly complex polyhedral data from
               commercial state-of-the-art simulation packages.",
  pages =      "2115--2124",
  month =      12,
  number =     "12",
  event =      "IEEE VisWeek 2011",
  issn =       "1077 - 2626",
  journal =    "IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics",
  volume =     "17",
  location =   "Providence, RI, USA",
  URL =        "http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2011/muigg-2011-gpg/",
}