Data Visualization: Principles and Practice

by Telea; Alexandru C.

• ISBN13: 9781568813066
• ISBN10: 1568813066
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-04
• Publisher: A. K. Peters

Summary

The goal of data visualization is to use images to improve our understanding of a dataset, drawing on techniques from mathematics, computer science, cognitive and perception science, and physics. In this introductory text, the author provides a compact introduction to the field that allows readers to learn about visualization techniques. The material focuses on those techniques and methods that have a broad applicability in visualization applications, occur in most practical problems in various guises, and do not demand a specialized background to be understood. However, the author has also included a number of less mainstream visualization techniques. With these methods, the book gives the reader an idea of the large variety of applications of data visualizations, illustrates the wide range of problems that can be tackled by such methods, and emphasizes the strong connections between visualization and related disciplines such as imaging and computer graphics.

Author Biography

Alexandru C. Telea is Assistant Professor of Visualization and Computer Graphics at the Department of Computer Science of the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. Since 2000 he has been working at the crossroads of data and information visualization, computer graphics, and software engineering. His recent research focus is software visualization, where he is working on techniques and tools that combine new parsing, interaction and rendering techniques to provide insight in industrial software projects of multimillion lines of code. He has co-authored over 80 scientific papers in national and international journals and conferences.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
How Visualization Works	p. 3
Book Structure	p. 9
Notation	p. 12
From Graphics to Visualization	p. 13
A Simple Example	p. 14
Graphics-Rendering Basics	p. 20
Rendering the Height Plot	p. 23
Texture Mapping	p. 29
Transparency and Blending	p. 32
Conclusion	p. 37
Data Representation	p. 39
Continuous Data	p. 39
Sampled Data	p. 44
Discrete Datasets	p. 52
Cell Types	p. 53
Grid Types	p. 60
Attributes	p. 68
Computing Derivatives of Sampled Data	p. 81
Implementation	p. 84
Advanced Data Representation	p. 96
Conclusion	p. 104
The Visualization Pipeline	p. 107
Conceptual Perspective	p. 108
Implementation Perspective	p. 119
Algorithm Classification	p. 126
Conclusion	p. 127
Scalar Visualization	p. 129
Color Mapping	p. 129
Designing Effective Colormaps	p. 131
Contouring	p. 140
Height Plots	p. 155
Conclusion	p. 156
Vector Visualization	p. 157
Divergence and Vorticity	p. 158
Vector Glyphs	p. 162
Vector Color Coding	p. 171
Displacement Plots	p. 174
Stream Objects	p. 178
Texture-Based Vector Visualization	p. 192
Simplified Representation of Vector Fields	p. 204
Conclusion	p. 216
Tensor Visualization	p. 219
Principal Component Analysis	p. 221
Visualizing Components	p. 225
Visualizing Scalar PCA Information	p. 227
Visualizing Vector PCA Information	p. 230
Tensor Glyphs	p. 233
Fiber Tracking	p. 237
Hyperstreamlines	p. 241
Conclusion	p. 243
Domain-Modeling Techniques	p. 245
Cutting	p. 245
Selection	p. 250
Grid Construction from Scattered Points	p. 253
Grid-Processing Techniques	p. 264
Conclusion	p. 274
Image Visualization	p. 277
Image Data Representation	p. 278
Image Processing and Visualization	p. 280
Basic Imaging Algorithms	p. 280
Shape Representation and Analysis	p. 297
Conclusion	p. 344
Volume Visualization	p. 347
Motivation	p. 348
Volume Visualization Basics	p. 351
Image Order Techniques	p. 365
Object-Order Techniques	p. 371
Volume Rendering versus Geometric Rendering	p. 373
Conclusion	p. 375
Information Visualization	p. 377
Introduction	p. 377
What Is Infovis?	p. 378
Infovis versus Scivis: A Technical Comparison	p. 380
Table Visualization	p. 389
Visualization of Relations	p. 395
Multivariate Data Visualization	p. 436
Text Visualization	p. 440
Conclusion	p. 453
Conclusion	p. 457
Visualization Software	p. 463
Taxonomies of Visualization Systems	p. 464
Scientific Visualization Software	p. 465
Medical Imaging Software	p. 469
Information Visualization Software	p. 472
Bibliography	p. 477
Index	p. 495
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.