Focus on Scientific Visualization

One of the important issues of Scientific Visualization is the utilization of the broad bandwidth of the human sensory system in steering and interpreting complex processes and simulations involving voluminous data sets across diverse scientific disciplines. This book presents the state-of-the-art in visualization techniques both as an overview for the inquiring scientist, and as a solid platform from which developers may extend existing techniques or devise new ones to meet the specific needs of their problems. A secondary goal in crafting this volume has been to provide a vehicle for teaching of state-of-the-art techniques in scientific visualization. The first part of the book covers the application areas fluid flow visualization in medicine, and environmental protection. The second set of chapters explain fundamentals of scientific visualization. It comprises contributions on data structuring and data administration, data modeling, and rendering. A final section is devoted to auditory representation of scientific data. Front Matter....Pages i-xx Fluid Flow Visualization....Pages 1-40 Volume Visualization in Medicine: Techniques and Applications....Pages 41-71 Application of Visualization in Environmental Protection....Pages 73-83 Data Structures in Scientific Visualization....Pages 85-102 A Visualization-Based Model for a Scientific Database System....Pages 103-121 Volume Synthesis Principles....Pages 123-137 Surface Interpolation from Cross Sections....Pages 139-189 Modeling and Visualizing Volumetric and Surface-on-Surface Data....Pages 191-242 Curve and Surface Interrogation....Pages 243-258 Sorting for Polyhedron Compositing....Pages 259-268 Joining Volume with Surface Rendering....Pages 269-292 The Volume Priority Z-Buffer....Pages 293-304 A Fourier Technique for Volume Rendering....Pages 305-316 An Improved Shading Algorithm for Radiosity Based Renderers....Pages 317-324 Some Annotations on X-ray Tracing....Pages 325-335 Auditory Representation of Scientific Data....Pages 337-346 Color Illustrations....Pages 347-368 Back Matter....Pages 369-379