Physical phenomena in science and engineering are frequently modeled using scalar fields. In scalar field topology, graph-based topological descriptors such as merge trees, contour trees, and Reeb graphs are commonly used to characterize topological changes in the (sub)level sets of scalar fields. One of the biggest challenges and opportunities to advance topology-based visualization is to understand and incorporate uncertainty into such topological descriptors to effectively reason about their underlying data. In this paper, we study a structural average of a set of labeled merge trees and use it to encode uncertainty in data. Specifically, we compute a 1-center tree that minimizes its maximum distance to any other tree in the set under a well-defined metric called the interleaving distance. We provide heuristic strategies that compute structural averages of merge trees whose labels do not fully agree. We further provide an interactive visualization system that resembles a numerical calculator that takes as input a set of merge trees and outputs a tree as their structural average. We also highlight structural similarities between the input and the average and incorporate uncertainty information for visual exploration. We develop a novel measure of uncertainty, referred to as consistency, via a metric-space view of the input trees. Finally, we demonstrate an application of our framework through merge trees that arise from ensembles of scalar fields. Our work is the first to employ interleaving distances and consistency to study a global, mathematically rigorous, structural average of merge trees in the context of uncertainty visualization.
Since a contour tree of a function @math can be constructed by carefully combining the merge trees of @math and @math in linear time @cite_17 , merge tree visualization shares the same design space as that of a contour tree. Contour trees are often visualized with node-link diagrams in two or three dimensions @cite_43 @cite_17 @cite_8 @cite_79 . Such diagrams are simple and powerful tools for abstract data representations @cite_24 , contour extraction @cite_60 , and data explorations in various application domains @cite_79 @cite_59 . Many attempts have been made in contour tree visualization to overcome difficulties in visual interpretation, visual clutter, and missing topological features @cite_71 .
@cite_8 @cite_60 @cite_24 @cite_43 @cite_79 @cite_59 @cite_71 @cite_17
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This paper introduces two efficient algorithms that compute the Contour Tree of a 3D scalar field F and its augmented version with the Betti numbers of each isosurface. The Contour Tree is a fundamental data structure in scientific visualization that is used to preprocess the domain mesh to allow optimal computation of isosurfaces with minimal overhead storage. The Contour Tree can also be used to build user interfaces reporting the complete topological characterization of a scalar field, as shown in Figure 1.The first part of the paper presents a new scheme that augments the Contour Tree with the Betti numbers of each isocontour in linear time. We show how to extend the scheme introduced in [3] with the Betti number computation without increasing its complexity. Thus, we improve on the time complexity from our previous approach [10] from O(m log m) to O(n log n + m), where m is the number of tetrahedra and n is the number of vertices in the domain of F.The second part of the paper introduces a new divide-and-conquer algorithm that computes the Augmented Contour Tree with improved efficiency. The central part of the scheme computes the output Contour Tree by merging two intermediate Contour Trees and is independent of the interpolant. In this way we confine any knowledge regarding a specific interpolant to an oracle that computes the tree for a single cell. We have implemented this oracle for the trilinear interpolant and plan to replace it with higher order interpolants when needed. The complexity of the scheme is O(n + t log n), where t is the number of critical points of F. For the first time we can compute the Contour Tree in linear time in many practical cases when t = O(n1 - e).Lastly, we report the running times for a parallel implementation of our algorithm, showing good scalability with the number of processors. Contour trees can represent the topology of large volume data sets in a relatively compact, discrete data structure. However, the resulting trees often contain many thousands of nodes; thus, many graph drawing techniques fail to produce satisfactory results. Therefore, several visualization methods were proposed recently for the visualization of contour trees. Unfortunately, none of these techniques is able to handle uncertain contour trees although any uncertainty of the volume data inevitably results in partially uncertain contour trees. In this work, we visualize uncertain contour trees by combining the contour trees of two morphologically filtered versions of a volume data set, which represent the range of uncertainty. These two contour trees are combined and visualized within a single image such that a range of potential contour trees is represented by the resulting visualization. Thus, potentially erroneous topological structures are visually distinguished from more certain structures. Moreover, topological structures can be revealed that are otherwise obscured by data errors. We present and discuss results obtained with a prototypical implementation using well-known volume data sets. We show that contour trees can be computed in all dimensions by a simple algorithm that merges two trees. Our algorithm extends, simplifies, and improves work of Tarasov and Vyalyi and of van The contour tree is a topological abstraction of a scalar field that captures evolution in level set connectivity. It is an effective representation for visual exploration and analysis of scientific data. We describe a work-efficient, output sensitive, and scalable parallel algorithm for computing the contour tree of a scalar field defined on a domain that is represented using either an unstructured mesh or a structured grid. A hybrid implementation of the algorithm using the GPU and multi-core CPU can compute the contour tree of an input containing 16 million vertices in less than ten seconds with a speedup factor of upto 13. Experiments based on an implementation in a multi-core CPU environment show near-linear speedup for large data sets.