Illustrative Membrane Clipping
Åsmund Birkeland, Stefan Bruckner, Andrea Brambilla and
Ivan Viola
ARTICLE,
Computer Graphics Forum,
June, 2012
Abstract
Clipping is a fast, common technique for resolving occlusions. It only
requires simple interaction, is easily understandable, and thus has been very
popular for volume exploration. However, a drawback of clipping is that the technique
indiscriminately cuts through features. Illustrators, for example, consider the
structures in the vicinity of the cut when visualizing complex spatial data and
make sure that smaller structures near the clipping plane are kept in the image
and not cut into fragments. In this paper we present a new technique, which combines
the simple clipping interaction with automated selective feature preservation using
an elastic membrane. In order to prevent cutting objects near the clipping plane,
the deformable membrane uses underlying data properties to adjust itself to salient
structures. To achieve this behaviour, we translate data attributes into a potential
field which acts on the membrane, thus moving the problem of deformation into the
soft-body dynamics domain. This allows us to exploit existing GPU-based physics
libraries which achieve interactive frame rates. For manual adjustment, the user
can insert additional potential fields, as well as pinning the membrane to interesting
areas. We demonstrate that our method can act as a flexible and non-invasive replacement
of traditional clipping planes.
Published
Computer Graphics Forum
Media
BibTeX
@article{Birkeland12Illustrative,
title = {Illustrative Membrane Clipping},
author = {{\AA}smund Birkeland and Stefan Bruckner and Andrea Brambilla and
Ivan Viola},
year = {2012},
abstract = {Clipping is a fast, common technique for resolving occlusions. It only
requires simple interaction, is easily understandable, and thus has been very
popular for volume exploration. However, a drawback of clipping is that the technique
indiscriminately cuts through features. Illustrators, for example, consider the
structures in the vicinity of the cut when visualizing complex spatial data and
make sure that smaller structures near the clipping plane are kept in the image
and not cut into fragments. In this paper we present a new technique, which combines
the simple clipping interaction with automated selective feature preservation using
an elastic membrane. In order to prevent cutting objects near the clipping plane,
the deformable membrane uses underlying data properties to adjust itself to salient
structures. To achieve this behaviour, we translate data attributes into a potential
field which acts on the membrane, thus moving the problem of deformation into the
soft-body dynamics domain. This allows us to exploit existing GPU-based physics
libraries which achieve interactive frame rates. For manual adjustment, the user
can insert additional potential fields, as well as pinning the membrane to interesting
areas. We demonstrate that our method can act as a flexible and non-invasive replacement
of traditional clipping planes.
},
pages = {905--914},
month = {June},
number = {3},
note = {presented at EuroVis 2012},
event = {EuroVis 2012},
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
volume = {31},
location = {Vienna, Austria},
keywords = {clipping, volume rendering, illustrative visualization},
URL = {http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2012/Birkeland-2012-IMC/},
}
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