IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS,
VOL. 11,
NO. 5,
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005
483
Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Section on IEEE Visualization Applications Eduard Gro¨ller, Member, IEEE Computer Society, Kwan-Liu Ma, Senior Member, IEEE, and Klaus Mueller, Member, IEEE Computer Society
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HIS issue
contains extended versions of three of the bestrated application papers taken from the IEEE Visualization 2004 Conference. Application papers present the contribution of visualization techniques toward the understanding of application-specific data. In particular, application papers must explain the effectiveness of the visualization methods for the particular application domain. For the IEEE Visualization 2004 Conference, 24 out of 71 submitted applications papers were chosen for inclusion in the conference program. As paper cochairs of the IEEE Visualization applications track, we started from the opinion of the reviewers. From the 24 accepted papers, we have chosen three very high quality submissions and asked the authors to provide extended and revised versions of their original work for this issue. Each of the extended application papers was thoroughly reviewed by several experts and underwent revisions before it was recommended for acceptance. We are grateful to the reviewers for their detailed and timely reviews and to David Ebert, Editor-in-Chief of TVCG, for his strong support and assistance. The paper “Reconstruction and Visualization of Planetary Nebulae” by Marcus Magnor, Gordon Kindlmann, Charles Hansen, and Neb Duric exploits strong symmetry characteristics of planetary nebulae to recover spatial structures from 2D images. With GPU-based volume rendering and nonlinear optimization, the nebula’s emission density is recovered. Fascinating 3D visualizations of planetary nebulae are created, which further educational purposes and can support astrophysicists in better understanding the formation process of these phenomena. The paper “Advanced Virtual Endoscopic Pituitary Surgery” by Andre´ Neubauer, Stefan Wolfsberger, MarieThe´re`se Forster, Lukas Mroz, Rainer Wegenkittl, and Katja Bu¨hler investigates a minimally invasive endoscopic procedure for tumor removal. STEPS, a virtual endoscopy system, is presented to train surgeons on the transsphenoidal approach and assist experienced surgeons in planning a
real endoscopic intervention. Interactive visualization is achieved through first-hit ray casting. The application provides various navigation and perception aids in the simulation of the surgical procedure. The paper “Visualization of Geologic Stress Perturbations Using Mohr Diagrams” by Patricia Crossno, David H. Rogers, Rebecca M. Brannon, David Coblentz, and Joanne T. Fredrich presents an inspection tool for finite element analyses of 3D real-valued second-order tensors. The Mohr diagram is a paper and pencil method from the material mechanics community. The authors originate the adaptation of this diagram type to visualize perturbed in-situ stress fields of geologic features. The Mohr diagram is used as an interactive glyph for probing as well as filtering through brushing and linking of principal stresses. Scientific visualization research is largely application driven. Many techniques are strongly motivated by the application scenario for which they were developed. Visualization research cannot be a goal by itself. It just acts as an interface tool to the domain expert to facilitate his understanding of his data and problems. Applications are therefore crucial in providing fruitful incitation for the further research of the visualization experts. The papers presented here are prime examples of how visualization helps to understand intricate application phenomena. We hope that the readers will find the papers inspiring and stimulating samples of work from our fascinating field. Eduard Gro¨ller Kwan-Liu Ma Klaus Mueller Guest Editors
. E. Gro¨ller is with the Vienna University of Technology, Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, Favoritenstr. 9/5. Stock (5th floor, A1040 Vienna, Austria. E-mail:
[email protected]. . K.-L. Ma is with the Department of Computer Science, University of California at Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail:
[email protected]. . K. Mueller is with the Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4400. E-mail:
[email protected]. For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
[email protected]. 1077-2626/05/$20.00 ß 2005 IEEE
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VOL. 11, NO. 5,
Eduard Gro¨ller (http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/ staff/EduardGroeller.html) received the PhD degree in 1993 from the Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms (ICGA), Vienna University of Technology, where he is currently an associate professor. His research interests include computer graphics, flow visualization, volume visualization, and medical visualization. He heads the visualization group at ICGA. The group performs basic and applied research projects in the area of scientific visualization (http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vis/). He has given lecture series on scientific visualization at various other universities (Tu¨bingen, Graz, Praha, Bahia Blanca, Magdeburg). He is a scientific proponent and member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the VRVis Kplus center of excellence (http:// www.vrvis.at/) The center performs applied research in virtual reality and visualization. Dr. Gro¨ller coauthored more than 100 scientific publications and acted as a reviewer for numerous conferences and journals in the field. He also serves on various program and paper committees. Examples include Computers&Graphics, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, EuroVis, IEEE Visualization Conference, and Eurographics Conference. He is or is designated paper cochair of Volume Graphics 2005, IEEE Visualization 2005 and 2006, and Eurographics 2006. He is head of the working group on computer graphics of the Austrian Computer Society and a member of IEEE Computer Society, ACM, GI (Gesellschaft fu¨r Informatik), and OCG (Austrian Computer Society). Kwan-Liu Ma (http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ma) received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Utah in 1993. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis. His research spans the fields of visualization, computer graphics, and high-performance computing. During 19931999, he was with ICASE/NASA LaRC as a research scientist. In 1999, he joined UC Davis. In the following year, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his work in parallel visualization. In 2001, he received the Schlumberger Foundation Technical Award for his work in large data visualization. He has served on the conference or program committees of several leading visualization conferences and symposia. He has organized two influential workshops: large data visualization in 1999 and visualization for cyber security in 2005. He is a member of IDAV (Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization) at UC Davis. Currently, he is leading research projects in parallel rendering, volume modeling and visualization, artistically inspired illustrations, visual interface designs, and information visualization. He is the editor of the VisFiles Column of the ACM SIGGRAPH’s Computer Graphics Quarterly. He is a senior member of the IEEE.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2005
Klaus Mueller (http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ ~mueller) received the BS degree in electrical engineering (University of Ulm, Germany, 1987), the MS degree in biomedical engineering (Ohio State University, 1990), and the PhD degree in computer science (Ohio State University 1998). He is currently an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University, where he also holds co-appointments in the Biomedical Engineering and Radiology Departments, as well as a position as an adjunct scientist at Brookhaven National Lab. His current research interests are computer graphics, visualization, volume rendering, visual data mining, medical imaging, GPU-accelerated computed tomography, and facial recognition. He is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER award (2001) and has authored or coauthored in excess of 80 scientific papers. He has served as a program cochair at various conferences and symposia, such the Volume Graphics Workshop (2001, 2003, 2005), the Symposium on Volume Visualization and Graphics (2002), and the applications track at the IEEE Visualization conference (2003, 2004), and he will serve as the tutorials cochair at the IEEE Visualization Conference 2005. He has also acted as a reviewer for numerous conferences in his areas of interest. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM.
