Abstract

Much research has been devoted to image understanding and the automated analysis of images of 2-D scalar data, but comparatively little work has been devoted to understanding higher dimensional data. Experiments and numerical calculations of fluid flows yield large data sets consisting of vector data on 2-, 3-, and 4-D domains. These are often too complicated for manual inspection, manipulation, and display. As with scene analysis, an abstract representation of the data set would greatly facilitate these tasks. Such a representation based on the flow topology can be constructed by locating and characterizing the critical points of the velocity vector field. These points serve as a basis for building a representation of the global topology as determined by the tangent curves of the vector field. This paper describes methods for the implementing this analysis on a computer and results from their application to 2- and 3-D fluid flow data sets.

© 1988 Optical Society of America