Fusion of Visual Channels - Scientific Visualization: Uncertainty, Multifield, Biomedical, and Scalable Visualization - page 112

Chapter 12
Fusion of Visual Channels

Min Chen, Klaus Mueller and Anders Ynnerman

Abstract In this chapter, we consider the need in multifield visualization to depict
information contained in two or more fields in a compositional manner. There are
many different visual channels, some of which are more commonly seen in visu-
alization than others. Channel fusion occurs when two or more visual entities have
to share the same screen space. By applying appropriate constructive operations on
visual channels in the composition, one may encode the integration as well as sepa-
ration of the underlying information depicted by the original channels. One special
situation is where multiple fields are a set of fields from different temporal steps,
which imposes additional constraints on the use of visual channels. It is inevitable
that the availability of visual channels will not be able to scale up to a large number
of visual channels. Hence, we consider briefly several general-purpose data mapping
methods that can be used to reduce the complexity of visual mapping.

12.1 Introduction

One primary goal of multifield visualization is to depict information contained in two
or more fields in a compositional manner, which facilities combinational overview
or visual comparison. In visualization, the most fundamental approach to achieve
this goal is to make use of different visual channels available in the design space,
which we refer to as channel fusion . This differs from a naive approach for displaying
individual fields independently, typically in sequence or using juxtaposition, which
usually result in a high cognitive load in gaining an insight about compositional

( B )
Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: [e-mail]
K. Mueller
Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA
e-mail: [e-mail]
A. Ynnerman
Norrköping Visualization Center, Linköpings Universitet, Linköpings, Sweden
e-mail: [e-mail]

M. Chen