IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VOL. 5, NO. 2, APRIL-JUNE 1999
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Guest Editor's Introduction: Special Section on Visualization Holly Rushmeier
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this issue, we present outstanding papers from the useful. Healey and Enns consider the selection of of texIEEE Visualization '98 Conference held in Research Tri- tures and colors to represent data values, using basic prinangle Park, North Carolina. The papers have been substan- ciples of human perception. In addition to considering tially extended from the form presented at the conference. texture and color separately, they consider how the effects The extended versions have undergone a thorough review of texture and color can interfere with one another when process and have been revised according to thoughtful used in combination. comments by expert referees. While these four papers treat diverse problems, they The papers included here are a sampling of the diverse have in common a high level of scholarship. Each gives the topics represented at the conference. We only have room in reader an excellent survey of previous work in their area, this issue to highlight some of the major trends in current describes new ideas, and presents substantial results to ilvisualization research. Two of the papers selected deal with lustrate the application of the ideas. They reflect the high the management and display of fundamental graphics level of work that continues to be presented each year at the primitives used in visualization-polygonal meshes and IEEE Visualization Conference. voxels. The other two papers deal with constructing the appropriate primitives for a visualization-feature extraction and the mapping of visual attributes to data. Holly Rushmeier received the BS, MS, and PhD Many visualization problems involve the display of large degrees in mechanical engineering from Cornell polygonal meshes. In the past few years, a number of geoUniversity in 1977, 1986, and 1988, respectively. metric simplification algorithms have been developed to faShe is a research staff member at the IBM T.J. cilitate the interactive examination of large meshes. LindWatson Research Center. Since receiving the PhD, she has held positions at the Georgia Instrom and Turk present a thorough examination of their stitute of Technology and the National Institute of memoryless simplification approach. An important aspect of Standards and Technology. In 1990, she was their paper is a comparison of memoryless simplification to selected as a U.S. National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator. In 1996, she several other recently published simplificationalgorithms. served as the papers chair for the ACM SIGVolume visualization remains the approach of choice for GRAPH Conference and, in 1998, as the papers co-chair for the IEEE many problems. Mueller et al. consider the splatting algo- Visualization Conference. She is currently editor-in-chief of ACM rithm for volume visualization. They introduce new varia- Transactions on Graphics. Her research interests include data visualitions of this approach that increase accuracy and efficiency. zation, rendering algorithms, and acquisition of input data for computer The new variations eliminate the "popping" artifact that graphics image synthesis. has been a problem when splatting is used to generate animated sequences. In data visualization, it is not adequate to find just a way to map data to graphics primitives for display. Brute force visualizations of extensive simulations can leave the user with large quantities of imagery to search through looking for phenomena of interest. Feature extraction techniques have emerged to distill the quantity of data to be mapped to images. Kenwright et al. present a feature extraction algorithm for indentifying key characteristics of 3D vector fields. While their specific application is fluid flow over aircraft, the technique can generally be applied to gain insight into 3D vector fields that arise in various disciplines. Constructing a visualization requires mapping data attributes to visual attributes. Not all possible mappings are N
Dr. Rushmeier is with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 30 Saw Mill River Road, Hawthorne, NY 10532. E-mail:
[email protected]. For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
[email protected],and reference IEEECS Log Number 109860. 1077-2626/99/$10.000 1999 IEEE
