Difference of inflow and outflow based 3D streamline placement

Abstract

Streamline based method is one of the most important vector field visualization methods. In the past streamline placements algorithms, little physical related feature was considered, which is very important in our opinion. A novel streamline placement algorithm for 3D vector field is introduced in this paper. We measure the difference between the inflow and the outflow to evaluate the local spatial-varying feature at a specified field point. A Difference of Inflow and Outflow Matrix (DIOM) is then calculated to describe the global appearance of the field. We draw streamlines by choosing the local extreme points in DIOM as seeds. DIOM is somewhat like flow divergence and is physics-related thus re-flects intrinsic characteristics of the vector field. The strategy performs well in revealing features of the vector field even with relatively few streamlines both in 3D vector field