2014
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Fast and Memory-Efficient Topological Denoising of 2D and 3D Scalar Fields
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. IEEE VIS) 20(12), December 2014
Abstract
Data acquisition, numerical inaccuracies, and sampling often introduce noise in measurements and simulations. Removing this noise is often necessary for efficient analysis and visualization of this data, yet many denoising techniques change the minima and maxima of a scalar field. For example, the extrema can appear or disappear, spatially move, and change their value. This can lead to wrong interpretations of the data, e.g., when the maximum temperature over an area is falsely reported being a few degrees cooler because the denoising method is unaware of these features. Recently, a topological denoising technique based on a global energy optimization was proposed, which allows the topology-controlled denoising of 2D scalar fields. While this method preserves the minima and maxima, it is constrained by the size of the data. We extend this work to large 2D data and medium-sized 3D data by introducing a novel domain decomposition approach. It allows processing small patches of the domain independently while still avoiding the introduction of new critical points. Furthermore, we propose an iterative refinement of the solution, which decreases the optimization energy compared to the previous approach and therefore gives smoother results that are closer to the input. We illustrate our technique on synthetic and real-world 2D and 3D data sets that highlight potential applications.
Resources
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- PDF [4.5 MB]
- Convergence evaluation of the 2D vorticity data set [0.1 MB]
- Discussion of the influence of the initial monotonicity graph [0.1 MB]
- Video showing persistence threshold, data weight, and manual selection [6.5 MB]
- Video showing the persistence-based filtering of a 3D scalar field [17.0 MB]
- Video showing the iterative convexification starting from random monotonicity graphs [0.6 MB]
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