Advanced techniques for real-time flow visualization

The purpose of Scientific Visualization is to provide qualitative information by means of graphic methods, bringing quick and intuitive data interpretation. In stationary vector flows and non-linear and chaotic dynamic systems, visualization is specially useful due to the impossibility to find closed analytic solutions to the system's behavior. Numerous methods have been proposed for representing vector fields, of which streamlines an LIC are the most important. In streamlines, we perform a numerical evaluation of the flow by means of trajectories that are tangent to the vector field. This technique is adequate for real-time visualization, but has several drawbacks in accuracy. On the other hand, the technique known as LIC (line integral convolution) is a texture-based method, in which the trajectories originated at every pixel in the phase portrait, are advected along an input texture to find the final color of that pixel. The LIC overcomes most of the drawbacks of the streamlines, but is too slow to be useful as a real-time visualization tool. In this work we will show a new visualization method, called CLIC (cumulative line integral convolution), which effectively combines the advantages of streamlines and LIC. We further discuss the implementation of a real-time visualization tool that is adequate for bringing an Internet based visualization service.