Visualization of computable scalar 3D field using cubic interpolation or kernel density estimation function

Abstract

Visualization of data, both computed or empirical, is an important part of knowledge acquirement process. Although computed data, e.g. molecular fields, are usually well structured for advanced visualization including volume rendering, often an enormous computation power is required for efficient data presentation including but not limited to visualization by means of isosurface. In order to reduce required computation power various algorithms have been developed. In the paper three of them, namely tri-linear interpolation, tri-cubic interpolation and approximation employing kernel density estimation function, have been tested and compared against direct isosurface solution in respect to computation time, accuracy and visual appearance. All examples were computed using hybrid data visualization styles using advanced texturing as part of data presentation. For fast prototyping of visual styles and computation of visual examples POVRay completed with newest version of ScPovPlot3D toolkit has been used.