Visibility Equalizer: Cutaway Visualization of Mesoscopic Biological Models

Mathieu Le Muzic, Peter Mindek, Johannes Sorger, Ludovic Autin, David Goodsell, Ivan Viola
Visibility Equalizer: Cutaway Visualization of Mesoscopic Biological Models
Computer Graphics Forum, 35(3), 2016. [Paper] [Slides]

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Abstract

In scientific illustrations and visualization, cutaway views are often employed as an effective technique for occlusion management in densely packed scenes.We propose a novel method for authoring cutaway illustrations of mesoscopic biological models. In contrast to the existing cutaway algorithms, we take advantage of the specific nature of the biological models. These models consist of thousands of instances with a comparably smaller number of different types. Our method constitutes a two stage process. In the first step, clipping objects are placed in the scene, creating a cutaway visualization of the model. During this process, a hierarchical list of stacked bars inform the user about the instance visibility distribution of each individual molecular type in the scene. In the second step, the visibility of each molecular type is fine-tuned through these bars, which at this point act as interactive visibility equalizers. An evaluation of our technique with domain experts confirmed that our equalizer-based approach for visibility specification is valuable and effective for both, scientific and educational purposes.

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BibTeX

@article{lemuzic-mindek-2016-viseq,
  title =      "Visibility Equalizer: Cutaway Visualization of Mesoscopic
               Biological Models",
  author =     "Mathieu Le Muzic and Peter Mindek and Johannes Sorger and
               Ludovic Autin and David Goodsell and Ivan Viola",
  year =       "2016",
  abstract =   "In scientific illustrations and visualization, cutaway views
               are often employed as an effective technique for occlusion
               management in densely packed scenes.We propose a novel
               method for authoring cutaway illustrations of mesoscopic
               biological models. In contrast to the existing cutaway
               algorithms, we take advantage of the specific nature of the
               biological models. These models consist of thousands of
               instances with a comparably smaller number of different
               types. Our method constitutes a two stage process. In the
               first step, clipping objects are placed in the scene,
               creating a cutaway visualization of the model. During this
               process, a hierarchical list of stacked bars inform the user
               about the instance visibility distribution of each
               individual molecular type in the scene. In the second step,
               the visibility of each molecular type is fine-tuned through
               these bars, which at this point act as interactive
               visibility equalizers. An evaluation of our technique with
               domain experts confirmed that our equalizer-based approach
               for visibility specification is valuable and effective for
               both, scientific and educational purposes.",
  journal =    "Computer Graphics Forum",
  number =     "3",
  volume =     "35",
  keywords =   "molecular visualization, visibility, occlusion",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2016/lemuzic-mindek-2016-viseq/",
}