IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VOL. 6, NO. 2, APRIL-JUNE 2000
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Guest Editor’s Introduction: Special Section on Visualization David S. Ebert, Member, IEEE —————————— ✦ —————————— issue contains extended versions of five out- anisotropic diffusion to aid the perception of complex flow standing papers from the IEEE Visualization ‘99 con- pattens and flow fields. ference and the IEEE 1999 Symposium on Information The work by Fua, Ward, and Rundensteiner presents Visualization (InfoVis ‘99) held in San Francisco, California. new techniques in one of the newest areas of visualization The authors of these papers were invited to significantly research: information visualization. Their work on strucextend their work and submit journal quality papers for ture-based brushes helps to solve the navigation problem this special issue. The papers were then reviewed and re- for visualization of hierarchically organized data. vised according to suggestions by expert referees. These five papers demonstrate the range of diverse reThese papers represent a sampling of the state-of-the-art search and the high-quality innovation presented at IEEE research from a diverse collection of research areas pre- Visualization ‘99 and InfoVis ‘99. sented at IEEE Visualization ‘99 and InfoVis ‘99. The first two papers discuss important systems issues and new techniques for visualization of large scale data sets. The David S. Ebert, Guest Editor next two papers discuss new techniques in classical areas of visualization research: flow visualization and medical visualization. The final paper presents new research in one of David S. Ebert received his PhD from the Comthe newest areas of visualization research, information puter and Information Science Department at visualization. The Ohio State University in 1991. He is an asSystems issues and visualization performance are still sociate professor in the Computer Science and important research problems because dataset sizes are Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research growing just as rapidly (or more rapidly) than processor interests are scientific, medical, and information speed, data transfer rates, and memory capacity. Sutton and visualization, computer graphics, animation, and Hansen present a new data structure and algorithm for inprocedural techniques. He performs research in volume rendering, realistic rendering, procedural teractive visualization and isosurface extraction of timetexturing, modeling, and animation, modeling varying datasets. Their Temporal-Branch-on-Need Octree natural phenomena, and volumetric display software. He has also been reduces I/O bottlnecks and achieves high performance iso- very active in the graphics community, teaching courses, presenting surface extraction for time-varying fields. New techniques papers, chairing the ACM SIGGRAPH 97 Sketches program, cofor the time-critical rendering of high-complexity scenes is chairing the IEEE Visualization ‘98 and ‘99 Papers program, and servpresented in the paper by Klosowski and Silva. Their sys- ing as program cochair for the IEEE Visualization 2000 conference. tem takes the approach of producing partially-correct images using a new visibility culling algorithm that can be used for time-critical rendering of visualization data, as well as architectural scenes and other geometric datasets. There are still many open research problems in classic application areas of visualization research. The paper by Kindlmann, Weinstein, and Hart presents new techniques for volume rendering medical data from a relatively new source, diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. They present extensions to previous volume visualization techniques, including barycentric opacity maps, hue-maps, and lit-tensors. Diewald, Preusser, and Rumpf present new techniques in another important area of visualization research: vector field visualization. Their work uses nonlinear
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• The author is with the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250. E-mail:
[email protected]. For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
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